Writing with AI

Overview

Uses of AI

Limitations of AI

How Much is Too Much AI?

Citing AI

Come to the RWC

Additional Resources

What is Generative AI?

Tools of the future

Artificial Intelligence is no longer confined to science fiction. It exists all around us, from voice assistants like Apple’s Siri, to Google Maps’ ability to predict traffic patterns, to writing assistants like Grammarly, and now ChatGPT. Generative Artificial Intelligence, or Gen AI, is an umbrella term used to describe any AI tools that are capable of producing their own content, including images, videos, audio, and writing. Some of the best-known, publicly available Gen AI programs include ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Google Bard.

These programs operate using large language models (LLMs), which can be trained to produce original content by being fed a large dataset of existing content. The Harvard Graduate School of Education explains that while the outputs LLMs generate can seem human, they most resemble brains without any consciousness or self-awareness, almost like a parrot repeating words it hears without understanding what they mean. So while Gen AI programs can be very useful, and have the potential to become even more human-like and accurate, they are still limited in their capability, and users should be careful with how they use Gen AI.

The controversy of AI

The release of ChatGPT for public beta-testing in November of 2022 quickly sparked a lot of controversy and concerns about what the AI was capable of. While some people quickly welcomed AI programs as a simple, efficient way to generate content from business emails to short stories, others worried about the impact this would have on education, the job market, and people’s ability to think critically and creatively.

Educators at all levels are still unsure of how to respond to the emergence of this new technology in their teaching. Some have embraced the power of Gen AI and encourage students to try it out within their assignments, saying that this will help students know how to work with the tools available to them once they enter the workforce, while others are still very suspicious of the technology and have banned students from using it for their classes out of concern that it will allow students to bypass learning important class concepts and skills. Whatever your personal stance on AI may be, it is important when writing for a class to understand your instructor’s policy on AI to avoid violating your academic integrity.

There have also been a number of legal concerns surrounding Gen AI. Because of the large amount of data needed to train the models at the core of these programs, some are concerned that such data has been “stolen” from private organizations and individuals. There are also a number of privacy concerns surrounding the information AI programs take from their users. In general, it is a good rule to never input personal information, or protected information (such as original research, private company documents, etc.) into an AI program.

USES OF GENERATIVE AI

Use thoughtfully

As you consider how to incorporate Generative AI into your educational journey, remember that just because technology can provide some service or convenience that does not bind you to its use. Walking maintains its own intrinsic value even if a car can get you farther, faster. Using AI effectively is not just a question of what technology can or can’t do; it’s also a question of what you want to do and whether technology facilitates or hinders that objective. Be thoughtful about how you use AI and cautious about the ways it might short-circuit your own learning.

Use responsibly

BYU does not have a campus-wide policy on AI, but the university is clear that “Academic use of artificial intelligence (AI) at Brigham Young University should be consistent with the principles of the Honor Code and the Academic Honesty Policy.”

Individual departments and instructors are encouraged to establish their own policies for how AI can be used in their classes and communicate them to students in syllabi or other materials.

It is up to students to understand and adhere to these policies in their work. If you’re not sure if it’s okay to use AI on an assignment, check the assignment description, course syllabus, and course materials on Learning Suite or Canvas to see if there is a specific AI policy. Be sure to check to see what types of tasks you are allowed to use AI to accomplish. Some professors are okay with certain uses of AI (such as helping you brainstorm, outline, or edit an essay) and not others (such as writing entire sections of text). Generative AI also tends to be more effective and accurate at performing some tasks than others.

Brainstorming with generative AI

If you’re having trouble getting started on a writing assignment or aren’t sure where to begin with a prompt, AI can be a great tool to help you get ideas flowing. You can input an assignment description into ChatGPT or a similar program and ask it to rephrase the prompt or give you possible topics to write about or ways to approach the writing. Keep in mind that these suggestions may be overly simplistic or not quite fit the requirements of the assignment, so it’s best to build off of what the AI generates rather than using its exact suggestions.

Once you get a sense of what you’d like to include in your essay, you can also ask an AI program to organize your ideas into an outline. If you don’t like what it suggests, AI is capable of providing lots of different examples or alternatives. Again, it is most helpful to take the AI output and adapt it to fit the exact requirements of the assignment and the ideas you have for your writing.

AI as a research tool

Research is often an important part of the writing process, and Gen AI programs can be very helpful with this step, but there are a few important things to consider when using them for research. While there are some AI programs designed specifically to help with academic research that have access to databases and other sources of credible information, most general-purpose Gen AI programs like ChatGPT do not. If asked to provide sources of information, these AI will provide nonexistent or inaccurate sources.

Once you find sources, these programs can be very useful in helping you understand these sources. Some programs allow you to upload documents into the chat, and you can then ask the AI to summarize the main points of an article or find more specific information. You can also ask it to explain difficult concepts in an article to make sure you understand what it is saying. This can be helpful for quickly determining if a source is relevant to your topic and understanding the basic concepts, but if you decide to use it in your paper, make sure to go back in and read the article (at least parts of it) for yourself to ensure that you are representing its information accurately.

AI & word choice

Generative AI can be a very useful tool if you ever get stuck on a word while writing an essay. Not only can it give you lots of synonyms like a thesaurus, but you can also ask it to elaborate on the definitions of a word to make sure that the word you want to use actually makes sense in the context of your paper. You can describe a word you’re looking for to ChatGPT or a similar program, and it will come up with words that might mean the right thing. As with any other word choice tool like a thesaurus or online dictionary, make sure that you are confident in what a word means and how it can be used in context before including it in your essay.

LIMITATIONS OF GEN AI

AI doesn’t know everything

While Generative AI can provide lots of useful content and information, like any other Internet source, that information must be verified. Unlike many other sources on the Internet, the users of Gen AI have no idea where a piece of information is coming from—sometimes it comes from nowhere at all! Researchers have collected examples of a vast array of errors made by ChatGPT to make improvements to the program and help users be aware of possible flaws. Besides outright errors, there are still lots of areas where AI can’t yet compete with humans. Gen AI is constantly improving, but it is important to be aware of what limitations it still possesses.

AI “hallucinations”

Because of how the large language models used by Gen AI programs are trained, when asked about factual information, a program’s responses are not based on any given source of information, credible or not. Instead, the program predicts the response based on the data it was trained on. This can lead the AI to “hallucinate,” or invent false information that it presents to the user as fact. These responses may sound very authoritative and are often correct, but there is never a guarantee of accuracy, particularly with certain programs. Any factual information given by Gen AI should be checked against a credible source, and if you want to include that information in an essay, cite that source, not the AI.

Logic errors

Computer programs can do a lot of amazing things that human brains can’t, but there are also a lot of intellectual tasks they have yet to master. AI can’t reliably understand human logic and reasoning, which often becomes important in academic writing. AI-generated text may take logical leaps, misinterpret information, or ignore relevant parts of the prompt they are given. When working on the argument and reasoning of an essay, it is best to get help from another human, whether a friend, classmate, or an RWC tutor!

Lack of emotion and poor persuasion

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one thing computers aren’t great at is understanding and expressing human emotion. This doesn’t matter much when writing something like an informational research report, but when writing is intended to persuade, emotions become very important. AI is not yet able to craft the kind of sophisticated emotional appeals that work best to persuade many human audiences, and they certainly lack the understanding of human nature that it takes to effectively analyze an audience in order to determine the most effective rhetorical strategy for convincing them of something. If you want to know whether your writing is persuasive, or how effective emotional appeals are in any piece of writing, you may want to seek out a human opinion.

Biases and over-corrections

Because AI programs are trained on human-produced data (much of which is taken unfiltered from the Internet), they are susceptible to the same kinds of biases humans are. While many programs are consistently updated to help them avoid offensive language and ideas, they will never be perfect. In some cases, their directions to avoid being biased or offensive causes them to over-correct, creating new problems. For example, in order to avoid perpetuating the idea that women are not fit for leadership positions, when asked what gender the first female president of the United States would be, ChatGPT responded that it could not predict the gender because people of any gender are capable of being president. While this example is an obvious case of a flaw in the AI’s programming, other issues of bias and over-correction may be less obvious, especially if you haven’t done your own research on the topic first.

Boring writing!

Finally, a lot of the writing produced by Gen AI is perfectly correct, but also very uninteresting to read. Gen AI often produces writing with an advanced vocabulary that is otherwise quite simple and formulaic. In order to get the most out of a piece of writing, good writers consider the impact the writing will have on their audience. In order to make your writing fitting and engaging for your audience, you may need to ask Gen AI for multiple drafts, tweak the prompt you give the program, and do thoughtful editing of your own by yourself or with a trusted peer, such as an RWC tutor.

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