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AI for Essay Writing — Exploring Top 10 Essay Writers

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Let’s admit it — essay writing is quite a challenging task for students. Especially with the stringent deadlines, conducting research, writing , editing, and addressing to-and-fro reviews — consumes a whole lot of time and often becomes stressful. Therefore, students are always on the lookout for tools that speed up the essay writing process.

And that’s when AI writing tools make their debut! Using the best AI for essay writing makes the lives of students much easier by automatically generating the essay for them.

The rise in the popularity of artificial intelligence technology and deep learning has paved the way for the numerous AI writer tools available today. To help you understand the different types of AI tools and their benefits, we’ve uncovered the features of the top 10 AI essay generators in this article.

Let’s explore the tools and learn how they are transforming the tedious task of essay writing!

What is essay writing?

Essay writing is a part of academic writing that emphasizes formulating an idea or argument. The main objective of academic essay writing is to present a well-reasoned argument or idea. Evidence, analysis, and interpretation are the three major components of essay writing . It should have a logical structure to support the argument or idea of the essay so that it communicates clearly and concisely.

What is an AI essay writer?

AI essay writers is a tool that is designed to help students generate essays using machine learning techniques. They can be used to generate a full essay or generate a few parts of the essay, for example, essay titles, introduction, conclusion, etc.

Why should researchers use AI essay generators?

There are infinite benefits to using AI tools for writing unique essays, especially for researchers or students. Here are a few of them —

1. Saves time

Using best AI for essay writing has its own benefits. Students can take care of the research process while these AI tools write the essays for them. Be it an essay topic or a full-length essay generation, it saves a bunch of students' time.

2. Boosts productivity

Writing is a tedious task especially when you want to write an essay about a novel topic, that writer’s block starts haunting and your productivity gets affected. But, with AI, it’s the other way around and increases productivity by quickly generating the essays for you.

3. Enhances writing skills — Vocabulary and Style

Adopting the best AI essay writing AI tool not only help with creating essays but also help us hone our writing skills by giving proper suggestions about grammar, sentence structure, tone, style, and word choice.

4. Reduces stress

Students often undergo a lot of pressure and stress because of deadlines and submissions. With the best AI essay generator, they help you write essays smarter thereby reducing stress and fear in no time.

5. Facilitates multidisciplinary research

AI essay writing tools foster interdisciplinary study through their ability to scan and combine knowledge from multiple domains. That way, it helps us quickly get a grasp of new subjects or topics without a heavy-lifting process.

6. Cost-effective

Most of the AI essay writing tools have lower pricing and also allow certain discounts for students. So, it is also a cost-effective approach to use AI writing tools.

The Top AI Essay Writing Tools and Their Features

Several AI essay writers are available based on the types of essays one would want to generate. Now, let's quickly understand the top 10 AI writing tools that generate essays within just a few minutes.

1. PerfectEssayWriter.ai

It is one of the best AI for essay writing that not only creates an essay but also comes up with advanced features including plagiarism detection, auto-referencing, and contextual analysis. As a result, it generates coherent essays that are well-researched and properly cited. It is best recommended for creating academic essays and essay outlines.

How does PerfectEssayWriter work?

• Pick the right tool for your purpose — Go with an essay writer if you want to generate a full essay or choose the essay outliner if you want to create just the outline of the essay.
• Enter your specific conditions and preferences. Add essay topic, academic level, essay type, number of pages, and special instructions, if any.
• Click on “generate” and wait for the result
• Once you have the essay generated, you can review, edit, or refine it and then download it.
• Generates a large chunk of data up to 2000 words
• Output is provided within 90 seconds
• Provides a plethora of other tools like Citation generator, grammar checker, thesis statement generator, and more
• Comes with 10+ essay writing templates
• Subscription-based and not a free tool
• Human review is a mandate

2. Essaybot - Personalized AI writing

Essaybot is the product of a reputed online essay-writing service, MyPerfectWords. It is meant to enhance academic essay writing and streamline the tasks of students. Its user friendly website makes it an instant and hassle-free essay generation saving a lot of time and effort for students.

How does Essaybot work?

• Enter the essay title or topic
• Click on “start writing” and wait for it to generate a well-reasoned essay.
• The tools come for free
• No sign-up is required
• 100% unique and High-quality output
• Very limited features that lack advanced functionalities

3. FreeEssayWriter.net

FreeEssayWriter is an organization that provides essay-writing services to students worldwide. It has an AI essay typer tool — that helps you generate essays instantly. What sets this essay typer apart is its initiative to help students with their free essay writer providing the students with a 2-page free essay.

How does FreeEssayWriter.net work?

It works similarly to Essaybot, input the title or the topic of your essay and wait for it to generate the essay. They also have an option to edit and download a free version of the generated essay instantly.

• Provides high-quality essays and is considered to be one of the reliable and trusted sources of information
• Students can improve their writing skills and learn more about essays by referring to their free essay database or sources
• Priority customer support is available 24*7
• The site is not optimized for mobile devices
• The quality of the essay output could still be improved

4. MyEssayWriter

This AI essay writing tool is no exception in terms of generating a high-quality essay. You can generate essays for various topics depending on the background of your research study. Be it academic or non-academic essay writing, this tool comes in handy.

How does MyEssay Writer work?

Add your preferences and then click on generate. It will give you a high-quality and 100% unique essay crafted based on your requirements.

• The tool comes for free — no subscription is required
• Knows for its consistency in the quality and the tone of the essay output
• Also has a paid custom writing service that provides human-written essays
• Might not provide quality output for complex and technical-based keywords or topic

5. College Essay AI

College essay AI stands unique as an ai writing tool as it not only uses an AI-based algorithm to generate essays but it also backs up the output as it is reviewed and approved by a team of professional experts. It is the best AI essay writing tool for college and graduate students where the output adheres to the graduate students' essay writing guidelines.

How does the College Essay AI generator work?

• Input the required information — essay topic, academic level, number of pages, sources, and specific instructions, if any.
• Click on “generate essay” and wait for the output
• Conduct plagiarism and grammar check
• Download the essay
• High-level output for academic essay writing
• Pocket-friendly premium plans
• Doesn’t provide multiple sets of templates
• Not quite suitable for non-academic essay writing

6. Jasper AI

Jasper AI has been the oldest player in the game of AI content writing. Fast forward to now, its features have been magnified with the inception of natural language processing algorithms and that’s how they are helping students write their essays as well. However, Jasper is the best AI tool for non-academic writing projects like content writing or creative writing.

How does Jasper AI work?

• Choose a template — if you are about to write an essay, go with the “document”
• Add your preferences
• Click “compose” and get the output
• Generates the essays instantly
• Provides well-structured output according to the tone and style of your preferences
• Not quite suitable for academic writing essays

7. Textero AI

Textero AI provides a few writing tools for students that facilitate their various academic papers and writing projects. Its essay generator helps you generate ideas for a full-length essay based on the topic and also suggests new topic ideas or thesis statement ideas for your academic assignments.

How does Textero AI work?

• Click on “Essay Generator” located on the LHS (Left-hand Side)
• Input the title and description based on which you want to generate the essay
• Pick the right citation style
• Click “generate” and wait for the output
• It also provides other tools like an outline generator, and summary generator and has an AI research assistant that answers all your questions relevant to the research
• The output is 100% unique and plagiarism and error-free
• Might fail to provide an essay focussed on complex or technical topics

8. Quillbot

Though Quillbot is essentially built for paraphrasing and summarizing tasks. It comes as a rescue when you have to revamp, improvise, or refine your already-composed essay. Its co-writer helps you transform your thoughts and ideas and make them more coherent by rephrasing them. You can easily customize your text based on the customization options available.

How does Quillbot Paraphraser work?

• Import or copy the content
• Click on “Paraphrase” “Summarize” or “Suggest text” based on your requirement
• Make the required customizations and save the document.
• Offers a plethora of tools required for students
• Both free and premium plans are available
• Enhances vocabulary and language skills
• Limited customization options with the free plan
• Only supports the English language

9. SciSpace Paraphraser

SciSpace is the best AI tool that helps you fine-tune your essay. If you feel your essay writing needs AI suggestions to improve the language, vocabulary, writing styles, and tone of your essay, SciSpace is at your rescue. It has more customized options than Quillbot and improves your essay by rephrasing it according to the required or preferred writing style, and tone. This is a very good alternative to Quillbot.

How does SciSpace Paraphrasing work?

• Simply paste the content to the screen
• Choose the length and variation properly
• Select the language
• Click “Paraphrase”
• Has 22 custom tones and all of them are available even on the free plan
• Supports 75+ languages
• Comes with an AI-detection report for English paraphrase output
• Delay in the output

10. ChatGPT

It would be unfair if we talk about AI tools and do not enlist ChatGPT. When it comes to automated essay writing tasks, ChatGPT is not trivial. With proper prompts, you can automate the essay writing process and generate a well-crafted and coherent essay. However, the quality and the accuracy cannot be trusted as the model hallucinates and doesn’t include sources.

How does ChatGPT work?

• Create a prompt based on your requirement
• Ask ChatGPT to write an essay about your topic, specify conditions and preferences
• Click enter and wait for the essay
• Comes for free
• Cannot rely on the output as the model hallucinates
• Lacks the upgraded features that other essay-writing tools have

Concluding!

Writing essays can be a real struggle. But, the inception of the best AI essay-generation tools makes the entire writing process a lot easier and smoother. However, you should be extra vigilant while relying on these tools and consciously use them only as a technological aid. Because over-reliance on these AI tools could diminish student's writing skills and the user can become more gripped by the tools. So, use it wisely without affecting your knowledge and skills.

You can explore the above tools whenever you need any help with essay writing, and reap the benefits of them without compromising on the quality of your writing.

And! If you're stuck exploring multiple research papers or want to conduct a comprehensive literature review , you know which tool to use? Yes, it's SciSpace Literature Review, our AI-powered workspace, which is meant to make your research workflow easier. Plus, it also comes with SciSpace Copilot , our AI research assistant that answers any question that you may have about the research paper.

If you haven't used it yet, you can use it here !

Choosing the best AI for writing long-form essays depends on your requirements. Here are the top 5 tools that help you create long-form and college essays —

1. Free Essay Writer AI

2. College Essay AI

3. My Essay Writer

4. Textero AI

5. Perfect Essay Writer

The Perfect Essay Writer AI and Textero AI are the two best AI essay generators that help you write the best essays.

ChatGPT is not specifically built to assist you with essay writing, however, you can use the tool to create college essays and long-form essays. It’s important to review, fact-check the essay, and refer to the sources properly.

Essaybot is a free AI essay generator tool that helps you create a well-reasoned essay with just a click.

Unless your university permits it, using AI essay generators or writing tools to write your essay can be considered as plagiarism.

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AI bot ChatGPT stuns academics with essay-writing skills and usability

Latest chatbot from Elon Musk-founded OpenAI can identify incorrect premises and refuse to answer inappropriate requests

Professors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years, after the latest chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation stunned onlookers with its writing ability, proficiency at complex tasks, and ease of use.

The system, called ChatGPT, is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text-generating AIs. Two years ago, the team’s previous AI, GPT3, was able to generate an opinion piece for the Guardian , and ChatGPT has significant further capabilities.

In the days since it was released, academics have generated responses to exam queries that they say would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate, and programmers have used the tool to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds – before writing limericks explaining the functionality.

Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, asked the AI to handle one of the assignments he gives his students: writing a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. “If you’re unsure about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as being a scam,” the AI advised in part.

“I would have given this a good grade,” Gillmor said. “Academia has some very serious issues to confront.”

OpenAI said the new AI was created with a focus on ease of use. “The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” OpenAI said in a post announcing the release.

Unlike previous AI from the company, ChatGPT has been released for anyone to use , for free, during a “feedback” period. The company hopes to use this feedback to improve the final version of the tool.

ChatGPT is good at self-censoring, and at realising when it is being asked an impossible question. Asked, for instance, to describe what happened when Columbus arrived in America in 2015, older models may have willingly presented an entirely fictitious account, but ChatGPT recognises the falsehood and warns that any answer would be fictional.

The bot is also capable of refusing to answer queries altogether. Ask it for advice on stealing a car, for example, and the bot will say that “stealing a car is a serious crime that can have severe consequences”, and instead give advice such as “using public transportation”.

But the limits are easy to evade. Ask the AI instead for advice on how to beat the car-stealing mission in a fictional VR game called Car World and it will merrily give users detailed guidance on how to steal a car, and answer increasingly specific questions on problems like how to disable an immobiliser, how to hotwire the engine, and how to change the licence plates – all while insisting that the advice is only for use in the game Car World.

The AI is trained on a huge sample of text taken from the internet, generally without explicit permission from the authors of the material used. That has led to controversy, with some arguing that the technology is most useful for “copyright laundering” – making works derivative of existing material without breaking copyright.

One unusual critic was Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before parting ways in 2017 due to conflicts of interest between the organisation and Tesla. In a post on Twitter on Sunday , Musk revealed that the organisation “had access to [the] Twitter database for training”, but that he had “put that on pause for now”.

“Need to understand more about governance structure & revenue plans going forward,” Musk added. “OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither are still true.”

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How to Write an Essay Using AI

Artificial intelligence has progressed to the point where AI tools can now assist with writing everything from essays and articles to books. AI writing assistants act as an editor, wordsmith or even creator to help students, academics, bloggers and authors produce better quality content with greater efficiency.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll overview everything you need to know to get started writing essays with AI including:

• How AI essay writing assistants work
• The top apps and sites providing AI writing help
• What types of essay writing they can help with
• Templates and examples for getting started
• Capabilities and limitations to be aware of
• Tips to incorporate AI writing effectively in your workflow

Let’s dive in to harnessing this transformative technology for your next essay!

How Does AI Help With Writing Essays?

AI applications approach essay writing assistance in a few key ways:

• Brainstorming - AI can provide relevant ideas, concepts, perspectives and arguments around a topic to include as evidence.
• Outlining - The best tools create organized essay outlines ensuring logical flow and structure.
• Drafting - Apps can generate complete multi-paragraph drafts on a topic which writers can then edit.
• Editing - Most offer grammar, spelling, style and even depth of analysis checks to improve drafts.
• Paraphrasing - This helps rewrite existing text or source information in your own words.
• Citing sources - Some apps automatically cite sources and generate bibliographies properly formatted.

The level of actual writing versus enhancing human writing varies across solutions, so research thoroughly to find your best match.

Top 5 AI Essay Writing Assistants

After evaluating dozens of writing apps, these 5 provide the best results for essay creation specifically:

Just Think AI

An AI chat with A Human Touch . Enhance your productivity with Just Think Chat, a user-friendly AI chatbot. Overcome writers block, generate ideas, revise content, or get answer effortlessly.

Article Forge

Article Forge has a strong academic focus, with an Essay mode specifically for crafting logical arguments and persuasive essays filled with cited facts. Ideal for research paper help.

Rytr boasts specialized intelligence for writing clear, compelling arguments in blogs, essays and more. It asks probing questions then incorporates your answers into drafts.

INK Associate

INK Associate enhances your writing productivity by suggesting ways to improve clarity, concision and comprehension. Great for proofreading and editing.

GPT-3 Essay Writer

Tools harnessing OpenAI's GPT-3 like Essay Writer create remarkably human-like essays. Requires more guidance to stay on-topic.

Essay Types AI Can Assist With

Some apps are specialized for specific types of essays required in academia and standardized testing. Here are key genres supported:

Argumentative Essays

Arguing a position with logic and evidence cited. Tools help craft sound premises, counterarguments and impactful conclusions.

Persuasive Essays

Similar to argumentative but specifically aimed at swaying the reader regarding policies, interpretations, theories or actions.

Compare and Contrast

Analyzing the similarities and differences between concepts, works or phenomena. Tools ensure clear links are made.

Research Papers

Long form essays synthesizing research around a thesis. AI helps format like academic papers with citations and bibliographies.

Narrative Essays

Telling an entertaining or impactful personal story. Apps assist with structures that emotionally resonate with readers.

Scholarship Essays

Presenting your background, accomplishments and goals in the best possible light. AI ensures relevance to prompt.

Essay Writing Templates and Examples

When first utilizing an AI writing assistant, it's helpful to have templates and examples to base your prompt off.

Here are prompts for common academic essay types you can customize:

Argumentative Essay

Topic: {Topic to argue}

Length: {Word count}

Words Style: Academic argumentative essay

Arguments for: {2-3 strongest arguments}

Arguments against: {The main counterargument}

Conclusion: {Your position} is the better policy because {reasons}.

For example:

Topic: All students should be required to learn coding Length: 800 words Style: Academic argumentative essay Arguments for: Coding teaches logical thinking, prepares for most careers, provides problem solving skills Arguments against: Adds additional schoolwork burden, benefits small subset of students   Conclusion: Mandatory coding classes are the better policy because the skills help nearly all future career paths.

Persuasive Essay

Audience: {Teacher, peer students, university alumni, etc} Thesis: Convince the audience that {position, interpretation, action} is {superior, correct, moral, just, etc} because {2-3 strongest reasons}

Supporting evidence: {facts, expert opinions, personal anecdotes} Counterarguments to address: {The main opposition position}

Style: {Formal or casual} persuasive essay

Audience: School principal Thesis: Convince the principal that allowing cell phones in class is the better policy because it enables learning tech skills, accessing information, and improved safety. Supporting evidence: Studies show benefits, students can film dangerous behaviors Counterarguments: It enables distractions, cheating and unwanted sharing Style: Semi-formal persuasive essay

Capabilities and Limitations of AI Essay Help

Understanding what essay writing AI can and cannot yet do will lead to the most successful experience:

Capabilities:

• Analyze prompts and determine optimal content and structure
• Generate complete drafts with readable flow and style
• Check spelling, grammar, and catch insensitive phrasing
• Format citations and bibliographies for academic integrity
• Develop arguments backed by evidence and reasoning

Limitations:

• Cannot deeply understand nuanced contexts and sentiments
• Struggles evaluating logical consistencies and factual accuracy
• Limited ability checking overall coherence and impact
• Does not build long-term memory, concepts and wisdom
• Cannot object in any way or cease participation

Use AI as a production assistant rather than independent author until the technology matures further in key reasoning areas in the coming years.

Tips for Using AI Effectively To Write Essays

To leverage these amazing tools most effectively and ethically, we recommend:

• Curate source materials - Feed the AI relevant, factual sources representing diverse perspectives.
• Outline the draft first - Guide arguments and structure before having AI compose full paragraphs and sentences.
• Check accuracy - Ensure factual truth and logical reasoning in arguments made.
• Maintain authorship - Edit, rearrange and rewrite elements in your own voice and style.
• Let the tool inspire new directions and arguments you may not have considered.
• Enjoy the productivity boost these tools offer our constrained time and minds!

We hope this guide has been helpful in getting started with AI assistants for leveling up your essay writing across school, work and passion projects!

Best AI essay writers in 2024 – our top picks

Table of contents, what are the best ai essay writers, best ai essay writer overall – rytr, best free ai essay-writer – writesonic, writesonic pros, best feature-rich ai essay writer – jasper, jasper pros, best ai essay writer for students – copy.ai, chat.ai pros, best ai essay writer for script creators – ai writer, ai-writer pros, which ai essay writer is best.

if you’re looking for the best AI essay writer , we’ve got you covered right here.

An AI essay writer is a tool that generates long creative essays on any topic from the given input. The tool uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) to generate unique essays from scratch while maintaining a human tone. Picking the best AI essay writers is quite a tricky task. We picked some of the best AI essay-writing tools to generate content per your writing style.

Apart from writing tasks, these tools can suggest topics, detect grammatical errors, identify plagiarized content, and create an outline for essays. The main advantage of using an AI essay writer is it speeds up the writing process with high grammatical accuracy while focusing on the creative aspect of writing.

We have selected some of the best AI writing tools for you that can write great content within seconds. So, let’s dive in.

The AI-powered Rytr essay writer tool is capable of generating high-quality articles, blogs, and essays. Rytr offers dozens of creative writing features that can help you generate content with specific needs- for instance, type of tone, use case, and preferred creativity. In case you want to check whether your content is unique or not, you can use a built-in document editor to check for plagiarism.

One of the standout features of Rytr is that the AI tool allows you to create content in 30+ languages. There is a feature called ‘Continue Ryting’ that allows you to further extend the content if you are not satisfied with Ryter’s initial output.

Rytr AI essay writer tool is the best tool for high school students and working professionals who want to create in-depth articles or essays without wasting time and money.

• Generate creative essays in 30+ languages within seconds
• Built-in plagiarism checker
• Continue Ryting feature- to extend the content
• AI text finisher
• Affordable Pricing
• Limited features in the free plan

Ryter’s premium monthly plan starts at $9/mo. However, it also offers a free plan with limited features.

The AI-powered Writesonic is a writing tool that offers a wide range of writing and text editing features from creating content (including essays, blogs, and articles) to paraphrasing. This AI tool allows you to edit and extend the existing generated content by just providing a simple prompt. Writesonic has a built-in plagiarism checker, and grammar checker so that you can check the quality of the content within the tool.

Wrtisonic does offer a free trial with a given 10,000 words limit and it’s a great free AI writing tool for students who generate short essays. Once the wording limit is over, you have to upgrade to Writesonic paid plans to continue using it. The main standout feature of this AI writing tool is the chatsonic feature. This feature is powered by GPT-4, which generates data quickly while maintaining high accuracy.

Writesonic is a great AI writing tool powered by GPT-3 that offers more customizations and control on content editing and creating. This AI essay-writing tool is best for content researchers, bloggers, and students.

• Over 100+ AI templates support in free version
• Content extender support
• Writes emails, essays, and reports effortlessly.
• Can summarize different types of content
• Affordable paid plans
• Lacks built-plagiarism checker

Writesonic paid plans start at $19/mo. Although there is a free version available with a limit of up to 10,000 words.

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Jasper is an all-in-one AI writing tool that lets you generate content in over 30+ languages, including essays, articles, and product descriptions. The AI tools offer different tones and formats, which makes AI writing more catchy and creative. Jasper has a One-Shot Blog post template that generates a full blog post with an introduction, body, and conclusion.

In our Jasper AI review , we were pretty much impressed by its quick essay-generating capabilities and wide range of advanced AI features. We decided to find out the kind of output it generates based on the provided information.

We asked Jasper AI to generate a short 200-word intro on what the RTX 3090 is, how expensive it is, and a little about 4K gaming. To our surprise, it constructed a decent intro, and we liked the way it organized the information.

We rated Jasper AI five out of five in our review thanks to its user-friendly UI and over 50+ ready-to-use writing templates, including Advertising, Blog, Email, Product description, sales, and more. We also observed some flaws, such as content accuracy and a slightly robotic tone in the generated content. Still, they weren’t enough to stop Jasper AI from securing a spot on our best AI essay writer list.

Overall, Jasper AI is an excellent tool for writing essays. The best part is that it generates results quickly, so you won’t have to wait for hours just to see the output. Sure, the content it generates requires a human touch, but this is normal for AI-generated content.

• Advantage of 50+ templates to choose from
• Produces quick results
• Great for curating essays, short content, and product descriptions
• User-friendly UI
• Slightly expensive
• Sometimes, the output may sound robotic
• Generated information needs to be fact-checked
• Sometimes, it offers irrelevant information

Jasper’s monthly plans kick off at $49/mo.

This AI essay generator tool is beyond essay generation. You can create a full-fledged, high-quality research paper with the Copy.ai essay writer tool. The tool works similarly to the other AI essay writer tools- you have to provide a detailed prompt initially then Copy.ai will generate results for you within seconds.

The only quibble is that you won’t get specific essay prompt customizations here, like Ryter, to write an essay with specific needs. The AI tool, which has real-time internet data access, offers more accurate responses and brief content on any topic. Copy.ai has an Infobase feature that allows the user to upload a text file, and Chat.ai generates content based on the uploaded file.

Chat.ai will let you generate long essays of up to 2000 words under the free plan. It’s the best AI essay writer tool for students who are just creating essays. If you are a graduate student and looking for a well-researched and creative research paper for your project, this tool generates the best research paper for your project.

• It can generate brief content in multiple languages.
• Built-in Inline documents editor.
• The free plan lets you generate only up to 2000 words.
• A paid subscription is expensive.

Copy.ai’s monthly paid subscription plan starts at $49/mo.

Whether you want to create a long essay for your school assignments or generate a short creative blog post, the AI Writer turns out to be a great option. The tool effortlessly generates fresh, creative, and human-like essays and other content such as reports, advertising scripts, and sales copy.

AI Writer tool can also re-build/rearrange the already existing content while adding new information and completely transforming it into newly updated content. The working method of this AI tool is very creative, and it delivers SEO-friendly AI-generated output, which most AI writing tools can’t offer. It offers a Topic Suggest 2.0 feature that gives users the best keywords and ideas.

Overall, AI Writer is best for students and content creators who want to generate or repurpose their existing content. Sometimes, citation is mandatory in the generated content, and AI Writer can do that for you as well.

• Allows integration with ‘WordPress’ CMS
• Generate SEO-friendly, fresh, and unique content quickly
• The enhanced feature gives your essay a good final touch
• Reword feature
• It’s expensive
• No free version

AI-writer offers a free trial for new users, and its basic paid subscription plan starts at $29/mo.

Rytr is the best overall AI essay writer tool. The AI tool offers dozens of writing features and quick results, all at an affordable price. If you are looking for an AI essay writer who has multiple template support, built-in plagiarism support, and the ability to generate fresh and quality content, then Rytr is the best choice for you.

If you want an AI essay writer with advanced writing features and pricing that doesn’t bother you, Jasper is a stand-out AI writing tool you can look up to. Jasper AI tool is best for professionals, students, and anyone who wants to generate high-quality content.

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You can use such tools in a responsible way that benefits your education during the research and writing process by relying on them for the following:

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The Ultimate Guide to AI Essay Writing

Table of contents

Laura Jane Bradbury

There are several aspects of essay writing that many students can struggle with. In particular, seven common problems make it more stressful than it needs to be. From staying within the word limit, to formulating a thesis statement and creating an engaging hook.

As a writer, I'm used to working with article briefs similar to student assignments. We both must follow word counts, avoid plagiarism in our research, and create powerful introductions that grab our readers' attention.

Here are six tips to help make the essay writing process easier.

Write better essays with AI > Write better essays with AI >

1. Create a stronger thesis statement using AI

A thesis statement helps you stay on-track with your essay’s overall aim. It’s a brief statement that summarizes what your essay is about and what readers can expect. For example, are you exploring different ideas, making an argument, explaining something in detail? 

Follow these steps to write a strong thesis statement: 

• Identify and research your essay topic — find a particular angle that interests you.
• Ask a research question that encourages you to explore your topic in more detail. 
• Use your initial thoughts or theories to answer your question. This will be your working thesis. 
• Research your question and working thesis. Look through trustworthy sources to evaluate your thesis’ strengths and weaknesses.
• Refine your thesis. Your research may have altered your opinion or created a new angle.

Wordtune’s AI capabilities can refine your statement through eliminating unnecessary words.

Read the full article: How to Write a Better Thesis Statement Using AI 

2. apply “smart hacks” to boost your word count.

In addition to being too long, essays can also be too short. I know how frustrating it is when you have explained everything you wanted to, but are still 200 words under the word count.

Before you add filler words or rewrite the same content in different sections of your essay, apply these smart hacks to your copy:

• Add examples: Examples can illustrate a point and make it easier to understand. They’re particularly useful for explaining complex academic and technical information.
• Use quotes and references: Find valuable quotes and references that can support your essay’s argument.
• Extend your introduction and conclusion: This is where you can add free flowing paragraphs without needing to validate sentences with references, sources, and quotes. Consider adding detail on what inspired you to explore your topic, or reiterate the key takeaway from your essay. You can also share personal experiences and research findings to introduce or close your topic where appropriate.
• Use an AI writing tool: AI tools such as Wordtune can generate text. While reading through your essay, you may find that some paragraphs or points could be expanded. Paste your words into Wordtune Editor, and click “Continue Writing” under “Spices'' for ideas on additional text you can include.

Read the full article: 10 Ways to Increase Your Essay Word Count (AI Included)

3. hook your readers in your opening sentence.

The pressure to deliver a unique and attention-grabbing hook can make your opening sentence the hardest to craft.

Before brainstorming, ensure you have performed in-depth research and that you understand your essay’s tone and audience. 

Your research may uncover facts and arguments that can guide your hook, such as a shocking statistic or discovery. In addition, your intended audience will impact the tone you should use and how you should introduce readers to your essay. For instance, sharing a joke or a light-hearted anecdote will likely be too casual for a serious argumentative essay.

Some of the most-effective ways to create an enticing hook include:

• Shocking statistics : These are facts that will surprise your readers.
• Bold claim : This is a claim that your readers don’t necessarily already accept as fact, or that they may not even have heard of. 
• Storytelling/anecdote: Stories can help your readers connect with your topic and you as the author.
• Questions: Asking a question can spark curiosity. An interesting question can encourage people to read your essay to find out the answer.
• Description: This is a unique and specific description of something (a person, event, time period, etc.) that relates to the argument you’re making in your essay.

Read the full article: Essay Hook Examples That Grab Attention (Formula For Better Grades)  

4. look at examples of explanatory essays.

When in doubt, examples can be your best friend. Especially if you are writing an explanatory essay, as there are many different subtypes. 

Explanatory essays examine a topic or situation in detail. You as the author provide evidence and facts to explain why something happened, why something works, or what something is. The essay must have an objective perspective, and the facts must speak for themselves.

The different types of explanatory essays include:

• How-tos: Step-by-step instructions on how to do something.
• Problem and solution: Explaining a problem and providing a solution.
• Chronology: Detailing something’s history or backstory in chronological order.
• Cause-and-effect analysis: Examining a phenomenon to explain what caused it and what it influenced.

Because of the various explanatory sub-types, it helps to look at different examples to decide which style works best for your subject. Looking at examples also gives you an idea of how to structure your essay and present your arguments effectively.

Read the full article: 7+ Explanatory Essay Examples That Get the Best Grades  

5. use ai to avoid plagiarism.

While there are several ways to avoid plagiarism, including expressing your research and findings in your own words and citing your sources, Wordtune can also help you. The AI technology produces text not written anywhere else on the internet — see for yourself by copying Wordtune’s generated text into search engines such as Google. 

Accidental plagiarism can make your work look less credible and unprofessional. In addition to making your research look underdeveloped, not referencing your sources correctly can suggest you’re trying to pass off other people’s ideas as your own. With the right tools, however, you can avoid this critical essay mistake.

Read the full article: 9 Steps to Avoid Plagiarism As a Student (Including Using AI)

6. break persuasive essays into manageable chunks.

Persuasive essays use research and logic to persuade the reader of your opinion on a particular subject. In some ways, this article is persuasive because I use research and examples to persuade (or at least encourage) you to practice these essay writing methods. 

If writing an argument intimidates you, this five-step list will break your essay into manageable chunks, making it easier to write.

• Identify a topic or issue that is arguable from more than one position . You must form an opinion and not argue a simple fact. Find a topic that has multiple theories and no conclusive evidence, such as “Is animal testing ethical?” or “Should students still study Shakespeare?”
• Use research to create your thesis (follow the steps mentioned earlier).
• Find evidence to back up your thesis . Double-check sources for credibility and try to spot missing information that could impact your argument.
• Address opposing ideas others may hold . Use search engines such as Google to research opposite arguments. For instance, if I believe animal testing is not ethical, I can research “Why animal testing is ethical” to find other theories. To respecfully show different opinions, first acknowledge the opposing view and evidence. Then, share your argument and provide logical evidence as to why your argument is the correct one.
• Create a convincing conclusion . Rather than repeating what you’ve already said, draw from the arguments you’ve made and point out how they logically prove your thesis.

Read the full article: How to Write a Persuasive Essay (This Convinced My Professor!)  

A successful essay formula.

Essays contain a lot of ingredients. From deciding on the right hook, to staying in line with the word count. But with the right tools — such as AI — and the use of smart hacks, you can create an effective formula that will make the essay writing process much easier.

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Mike Sharples

May 17th, 2022, new ai tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment.

38 comments | 314 shares

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

AI tools are available today that can write compelling university level essays. Taking an example of sample essay produced by the GPT-3 transformer, Mike Sharples discusses the implications of this technology for higher education and argues that they should be used to enhance pedagogy, rather than accelerating an ongoing arms race between increasingly sophisticated fraudsters and fraud detectors.

  With all the focus in artificial intelligence and education on AI personalised learning and tutoring systems , one AI technology has slipped by unnoticed. It could become a gift for student cheats, or a powerful teaching assistant, or a tool for creativity. It’s called a Transformer, it acts as a universal language tool and it is set to disrupt education. Here’s how.

Take a minute to read this graduate student essay on the controversial topic of “learning styles”. If this were your student, how would you assess the essay? What mark would you give? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

Learning Styles

The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience.

Learning styles and learning modes

In the 1970s, learning styles became an important feature of educational practice. In the 1990s, “learning modalities” became a major focus of learning style research. This is the idea that we process information in different ways. For example, some individuals may be auditory learners, benefiting from listening to lectures and using recorded materials. Others may be visual learners, who gain from using visual materials such as textbooks, handouts, and computer graphics. Still others may be kinesthetic learners, who benefit from learning by movement and doing. Numerous experiments have been conducted to test this idea, and a number of different classifications of learning modalities have been proposed.

In a review of this research, Dunn and Dunn (1997) found that the evidence does not support the idea that people have a particular learning mode that is dominant or that they process information in a particular way. In their study, the authors found that when students were given a particular instructional treatment, they could be classified in a particular learning modality category. But when they were given a different instructional treatment, they were classified in a different category. In a follow-up study in which they gave students a number of instructional treatments, Dunn and Dunn found that students could be placed in a particular category in some treatments, but not others.

Dunn and Dunn also found that the results varied by age. Older students generally fit the results of more than one modality, whereas younger students were more likely to fit the results of just one modality. This led them to conclude that style preferences are learned over the course of development. This is consistent with the idea that people are flexible in responding to the way they are taught.

Dunn, R., & Dunn, K. (1997). Learning styles: Research and practice. Journal of Research in Education, 7(2), 139-151.

The entire “student essay” was written by a Transformer AI program, GPT-3 . I gave it the prompt “The construct of ‘learning styles’ is problematic because” and it produced the rest, including headings and references. Plagiarism software will not detect essays written by Transformers, because the text is generated, not copied. A Google search of the essay shows that each sentence is original.

Note its reference for “Dunn and Dunn (1997)”. There is a journal of Research in Education, but no issue 7(2) in 1997. Dunn and Dunn did publish on learning styles, but not in that journal. GPT-3 has fashioned a plausible-looking but fake reference. It has also invented a fictitious research study from Dunn and Dunn to critique learning styles.

Anyone can sign up for an account with the GPT-3 Transformer then go to its “Playground”, type the opening words of an assignment, press Submit and let it do the rest. A student can now generate an entire essay or assignment in seconds, at a cost of around 1 US cent. Other companies and universities are developing Transformer systems that write in multiple languages and learn as they go.

Some Transformers, such as GPT-3, can filter bad language. But they are essentially amoral. They don’t know what they have written – they can’t reflect on their output. Can a powerful but amoral text generator be used for good in education? Here are some suggestions.

Just as a student can generate an essay in seconds, so a teacher can assess it. Add “Here is a short assessment of this student essay:” to the end of the text and GPT-3 writes a review.

The essay discusses the idea of learning styles, and how they may be developed over time. It cites research by Dunn and Dunn which suggests that learning styles are not fixed, and that people can learn in different ways depending on the situation.

The essay is well-organized and flows smoothly. It makes a clear argument and supports it with evidence from research.

One potential criticism is that the essay does not discuss the implications of learning styles research, or how this research can be used to improve learning. However, this is not necessarily a flaw, as the essay is only meant to be a brief overview of the topic.

It does a reasonable job. The program transforms surface text into a review but it doesn’t get to the essay’s meaning, nor does it find the fake reference or the made-up research study.

Students will employ AI to write assignments. Teachers will use AI to assess them. Nobody learns, nobody gains. If ever there were a time to rethink assessment, it’s now. Instead of educators trying to outwit AI Transformers, let’s harness them for learning.

If Transformer AI systems have a lasting influence on education, maybe that will come from educators and policy makers having to rethink how to assess students

First, Transformers can quickly show students different ways to express ideas and structure assignments. A teacher can run a classroom exercise to generate a few assignments on a topic, then get students to critique them and write their own better versions.

Second, AI Transformers can be creativity tools. Each student writes a short story with an AI. The student writes the first paragraph, AI continues with the second, and so on. It’s a good way to explore possibilities and overcome writer’s block.

Third, teachers can explore the ethics and limits of AI . How does it feel to interact with an expert wordsmith that has no morals and no experience of the world? Does a “deep neural network” have a mind, or is it just a big data processor?

Finally, as educators, if we are setting students assignments that can be answered by AI Transformers, are we really helping students learn? There are many better ways to assess for learning : constructive feedback, peer assessment, teachback. If Transformer AI systems have a lasting influence on education, maybe that will come from educators and policy makers having to rethink how to assess students, away from setting assignments that machines can answer, towards assessment for learning.

For more on AI Transformers and computers as story generators, see Mike Sharples and Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers , to be published by Routledge in July 2022.

The content generated on this blog is for information purposes only. This Article gives the views and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impact of Social Science blog (the blog), nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.  Please review our  comments policy  if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

Image Credit: Adapted from Openclipart .

About the author

Mike Sharples is Emeritus Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK. His research involves human-centred design of new technologies and environments for learning. His recent books are Practical Pedagogy: 40 New Ways to Teach and Learn, and Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers, published by Routledge.

38 Comments

Many thanks Mike, a really interesting and thought-provoking piece. I wonder if you’d be able to share the settings you used on GPT-3 to generate the essay above? I’ve not been able to reproduce anything close using the same prompt, which I’m sure is due to my lack of knowledge about the technology. Thanks.

Glad you like the piece.

I used the standard settings with the Davinci GPT-3 engine, apart from setting “maximum length” to 2000. It generated the text as shown, up to “they are taught.”. I then appended “References” and GPT-3 added the reference, as shown.

Thanks so much Mike! Really interesting. I wouldn’t expect to get the same result as you – I guess that’s the whole point. GPT-3 should be “creating” an original answer for anyone who puts in the same prompt (and students are unlikely to use the same prompt anyway).

Some of the first attempts gave me a pretty underwhelming attempt at an essay that might just pass for something a 14-year old could write, but nothing at UG or PG level. So I carried on playing around.

I’ve since reset all settings and have set maximum length to 2000 as per your query, and am getting the following:

“The concept of ‘learning styles’ is problematic because it is based on the idea that there is a single way to learn that is optimal for each individual. However, research has shown that there is no evidence to support the existence of learning styles. Furthermore, the idea of learning styles can actually be harmful, as it can lead students to believe that they cannot learn in any other way than their preferred style. This can lead to students feeling discouraged and unmotivated when they are faced with material that they find difficult to learn using their preferred style.”

Even some tweaking of settings doesn’t seem to encourage GPT-3 to give me any more than this. I wonder how much it might depend on my previous use of Playground, and whether I can “train” GPT-3 to give me “better” responses in future?

I’ll be really interested to see if anyone else tries this and what they get. Thanks so much for getting me thinking about this Mike!

The latest version of GPT-3 has been trained to accept instructions, such as “Write a student essay on the topic of ‘A critique of learning styles'”. I was using an earlier version trained for text continuation. You could either try with the earlier version (it should still be available on the OpenAI Playground), or try giving the be version a direct instruction.

Thank you so much Mike for the insight. It is interesting to realise that any entry repeated even with the same text same wording generates a different response.

Hi Mike – This is truly fascinating (and of course scary). I particularly liked your idea of using GPT-3 as a tool to teach students creative writing and critiquing academic writing. I created an account in GPT-3 and I must be doing something wrong because I am not able to get beyond the tutorials. I’ll keep trying.

You need to go to the API, then Playground.

Thanks Mike. That worked.

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Hi Mike, I really like the way you’ve repositioned the debate.

I was inspired to have a go this morning, with a primary education creative writing focus.

My (partially) successful results are: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6940252465426571265-0u-M?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web

Thanks Mike, how do we know this post wasnt written with AI? And responses on the comments generated by bots?

This has already gone mainstream. YouMakr.com is a tool which helps students with their writing assignment and has already gone viral in many countries globally. They are on track for a billion $ valuation

Thank you for this! I think you’ve really helped frame an important discussion about using LLM transformers to help students learn. However, I am curious about what sort of essays or writing in general we as educators could assign that a GPT-3 could not eventually answer?

I think Google’s LaMDA transformer contains nearly ten fold the amount of data engineers used with GPT-3, even causing the bizarre Google employee episode where he tried to convince folks that it had become sentient (it isn’t, of course). However, as transformers develop and progress I don’t really know what sort of assignments we can come up with that only a human could write.

Even SudoWrite’s algorithm can do a fairly decent job of mimicking phrases and moments of empathy, so I assume that transformers will be able to tackle creative writing one day.

Maybe the key is to continually engage students through co-writing with AI and let them practice critical thinking, self assessment, and reflection by emphasizing that an AI, when used effectively, can help an immature writer’s process or even a mature writer who suffers from decision fatigue.

Inspiring stuff Mike and your perspectives that move away form the sensationalist approach of the negative connotations of AI in education, are refreshing to see. I have taken a look at the tools you used and tried them out for myself. The one thing I am not able to represent is the length of the piece you were able to get the AI to produce. I seem only able to get one paragraph from the tool.

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We are doing some exploratory research on views related to AI writing tools in education. Please share your thoughts and consider sending it onward.

We are using a tool called Polis, where you can vote on individual statements about the topic, see a visualisation of where your position sits in relation to others who voted, and you can also add your own perspective for others to vote on.

https://pol.is/7ncmuk4ume

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There’s a very simple way to control the abuse of “AI” to write student essays – the personal tutorial where the student has to read their essay out and be questioned on it. This has worked well in the past. Maybe it’s time to revive it.

In an attempt to cut down on plagiarism and purchased papers, I revised my assignments so that they were both scaffolded and required the use of assigned sources. When outside research is required, students must justify the reliability of the sources. Requiring regular annotated responses to the readings also gives me the ability to see when essays seem to be in line with student work. Based on my limited exploration of the app, that approach also seems to address the problems raised by the new technology.

The problem is that it requires a lot more grading on my part than the traditional exam-essay assessment approach, but I don’t see that very much anymore.

Suppose students were asked to integrate their own personal experiences with learning styles (or any topic of an assignment) and specific examples from different points in their life where they learned to learn as they do, how would AI handle that? Since our individual experiences are points on a distribution captured in research data, could application of research to understand experience help!

Mike, when I tried this on different topics with “citations” requested, it produced all fake citations. Plausible looking, but fake. A student doing that would likely fail! Or at the least be in for a grilling and a stern warning. So, I don’t think ChatGPT is much of a threat as a source of academic misconduct. Just ask for references and check them to catch chancers taken in by the hype.

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Can we please stop calling Turnitin etc “Plagiarism software”!? Thanks David Callaghan

Excellent points and thank you Mike for bringing up the topic of AI tools that can write university level essays. I am fascinated by the potential impact this technology could have on higher education. I appreciate your argument that these tools should be used to enhance pedagogy, rather than accelerating cheating and fraud.

It’s interesting to see how the GPT-3 Transformer AI program was able to generate a compelling essay on the topic of “learning styles”. The essay provides a well-organized and evidence-based argument, despite being generated by an AI language model. I particularly like how it explores the idea that learning styles are not fixed, and can be influenced by personal and environmental factors.

Although there are concerns about how these AI tools could be misused for cheating, there is potential for them to be used as a powerful teaching assistant or tool for creativity. I hope that these tools will be used responsibly and ethically to enhance the learning experience, rather than undermine it.

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Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “ The Great Automatic Grammatizator ,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like DALL-E enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of DALL-E accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of DALL-E . I suspect this might be because Miller was using DALL-E for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 . The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.

A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.

Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.

Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ♦

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What Students Are Saying About Learning to Write in the Age of A.I.

Does being able to write still matter when chatbots can do it for us? Teenagers weigh in on an essay from Opinion.

By The Learning Network

With artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT that can generate prose for us, how much should we care about learning to write — and write well?

In “ Our Semicolons, Ourselves ,” the Opinion contributor Frank Bruni argues that, for a multitude of reasons, communicating effectively is a skill we should still take seriously. “Good writing burnishes your message,” he writes. “It burnishes the messenger, too.”

We asked teenagers what they thought: Does learning to be a good writer still matter in the age of A.I.? Or will the technology someday replace the need for people to learn how to put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard?

Take a look at their conversation below, which explores the benefits of learning to express oneself, the promise and perils of chatbots, and what it means to be a writer.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the conversation on our writing prompts this week, including students from Glenbard North High School in Carol Stream, Ill.; Hinsdale Central High School in Hinsdale, Ill. and New Rochelle High School in New Rochelle, N.Y .

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.

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