5 mistakes when using AI technology for essay writing you should avoid

For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, most learning institutions in the United States and worldwide adopted e-learning to help students, teaching staff, and other personnel stay safe from the coronavirus. What does this mean? Students didn’t have to visit physical libraries to complete their assignments and homework.

As such, learners took advantage of the Internet to research and write their papers. What’s more, AI tools such as Grammarly came in handy, especially for checking and rectifying grammar mistakes such as wordiness, subject-verb disagreement, passive voices, and tautologies, among many others. Everything seemed okay for students as they were able to submit well-structured papers with low similarity scores.

However, the advent of open AI that mimicked how humans write presented a significant threat to the integrity of college education. Adding more fuel to the fire, over 30 million students in learning institutions were using ChatGPT on 15th February 2023. Thanks to technological advances, computer experts have come up with software to help schools and faculties establish if a student has used AI in writing their essays.

Even without running a paper through an AI content detector, a professor can use the following factors to ascertain whether it’s human-written or not.

Plagiarism and originality

Other than a lower score of similarity, how do students check plagiarism? In most cases, when professors give instructions for assignments or homework, they often caution learners on copying or rephrasing the author’s arguments and opinions without proper citations and referencing. What’s more, college canvases and blackboards have embedded anti-plagiarism detectors that automatically check for similarity.

However, some professors often summon students to explain the high plagiarism on their assignments in spite of their low similarity scores. How does this happen? When a lecturer reads your paper, he or she can notice if you just paraphrased a document from an online database or used an AI tool like QuillBot or ChatGPT. The underlying rationale for your professor flagging your assignment for high plagiarism concerns his or her knowledge of your writing style and language proficiency.

As such, if you seek essay help online, you should consider websites with different categories of writers. For example, an international student, especially in their first and second year of study, should neither request an ENL nor ESL-top 10 experts. This measure will help you receive a paper that matches your language proficiency and writing style.

Lack of understanding and depth

Assuming your professor requires you to write a reflection essay about your internship experience in a community medical center in your region. If you enter these instructions into an open or premium AI, it will instantly generate general information on your clinical experience. In such a case, do you think this tool will remember the specifics at your workplace?

Definitely, it won’t include the procedures and practices that you conducted within a specific period. Usually, AI algorithms generate information on the basis of real-time data. As a consequence, if you use ChatGPT to write a reflection essay on your internship experience, it will use the currently available data rather than the knowledge you’ve gained.

Inaccuracies and misinterpretations

According to the Quote, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity,” by Albert Einstein, underscores the significance of embracing the role of innovation tools in every aspect of life. For example, students can use an open or premium AI for researching and organizing ideas. In other words, AI-generated content should be a guide for searching qualitative and quantitative evidence on the Internet to support the points of an essay or homework.

Even if you’re among 53% of college students who ask ChatGPT to write your essays, you can take advantage of custom writing to help you double-check the accuracy of information against recent scholarly sources. Ideally, let the AI tool assist you with your first stage of writing (developing an outline) and leave the rest of the steps to professional experts!

Improper formatting and structure

Even with the available standard APA and MLA formatting styles on the Purdue Owl, each university might have its specific guideline. As such, after you’ve generated your essay with an AI tool of your choice, you must double-check with the provided rubric. For example, the standard guideline for APA 7 doesn’t accept the inclusion of the running head on the cover page; however, some universities and colleges state otherwise.

Considering that, in most cases, AI doesn’t include updates on citations and referencing of sources, human intervention is necessary. For example, even the citation machine on Purdue Owl doesn’t provide accurate information when used to create reference entries! What’s more, passive voice sentences are predominant in AI-generated content, which most universities consider as poor structure and construction of ideas.

Ideally, human intervention is necessary to have accurate formatting and sentence structure in an essay.

Loss of personal voice and style

Even though AI-generated content incorporates transition elements and a variety of sentences, it completely eliminates the human touch. In recent years, scholars have emphasized the importance of including narratives in scientific papers. For example, a critical examination of disease epidemiology should include background information backed with case examples and scenarios. Such writing style isn’t possible with AI as it often revolves around summarizing evidence.

What’s more, nowadays, professors obligate students to include personal evaluations of sources, even in literature reviews. For instance, scholars must find inconsistencies in findings and deduce their judgment.

In retrospect, universities and colleges cannot run away from technology. As such, students should understand the proper way of using AI-generated content in their assignments to avoid the violation of academic integrity.