can chatgpt rewrite essays

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Should I Use ChatGPT to Write My Essays?

Everything high school and college students need to know about using — and not using — ChatGPT for writing essays.

Jessica A. Kent

ChatGPT is one of the most buzzworthy technologies today.

In addition to other generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, it is expected to change the world. In academia, students and professors are preparing for the ways that ChatGPT will shape education, and especially how it will impact a fundamental element of any course: the academic essay.

Students can use ChatGPT to generate full essays based on a few simple prompts. But can AI actually produce high quality work, or is the technology just not there yet to deliver on its promise? Students may also be asking themselves if they should use AI to write their essays for them and what they might be losing out on if they did.

AI is here to stay, and it can either be a help or a hindrance depending on how you use it. Read on to become better informed about what ChatGPT can and can’t do, how to use it responsibly to support your academic assignments, and the benefits of writing your own essays.

What is Generative AI?

Artificial intelligence isn’t a twenty-first century invention. Beginning in the 1950s, data scientists started programming computers to solve problems and understand spoken language. AI’s capabilities grew as computer speeds increased and today we use AI for data analysis, finding patterns, and providing insights on the data it collects.

But why the sudden popularity in recent applications like ChatGPT? This new generation of AI goes further than just data analysis. Instead, generative AI creates new content. It does this by analyzing large amounts of data — GPT-3 was trained on 45 terabytes of data, or a quarter of the Library of Congress — and then generating new content based on the patterns it sees in the original data.

It’s like the predictive text feature on your phone; as you start typing a new message, predictive text makes suggestions of what should come next based on data from past conversations. Similarly, ChatGPT creates new text based on past data. With the right prompts, ChatGPT can write marketing content, code, business forecasts, and even entire academic essays on any subject within seconds.

But is generative AI as revolutionary as people think it is, or is it lacking in real intelligence?

The Drawbacks of Generative AI

It seems simple. You’ve been assigned an essay to write for class. You go to ChatGPT and ask it to write a five-paragraph academic essay on the topic you’ve been assigned. You wait a few seconds and it generates the essay for you!

But ChatGPT is still in its early stages of development, and that essay is likely not as accurate or well-written as you’d expect it to be. Be aware of the drawbacks of having ChatGPT complete your assignments.

It’s not intelligence, it’s statistics

One of the misconceptions about AI is that it has a degree of human intelligence. However, its intelligence is actually statistical analysis, as it can only generate “original” content based on the patterns it sees in already existing data and work.

It “hallucinates”

Generative AI models often provide false information — so much so that there’s a term for it: “AI hallucination.” OpenAI even has a warning on its home screen , saying that “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.” This may be due to gaps in its data, or because it lacks the ability to verify what it’s generating. 

It doesn’t do research  

If you ask ChatGPT to find and cite sources for you, it will do so, but they could be inaccurate or even made up.

This is because AI doesn’t know how to look for relevant research that can be applied to your thesis. Instead, it generates content based on past content, so if a number of papers cite certain sources, it will generate new content that sounds like it’s a credible source — except it likely may not be.

There are data privacy concerns

When you input your data into a public generative AI model like ChatGPT, where does that data go and who has access to it? 

Prompting ChatGPT with original research should be a cause for concern — especially if you’re inputting study participants’ personal information into the third-party, public application. 

JPMorgan has restricted use of ChatGPT due to privacy concerns, Italy temporarily blocked ChatGPT in March 2023 after a data breach, and Security Intelligence advises that “if [a user’s] notes include sensitive data … it enters the chatbot library. The user no longer has control over the information.”

It is important to be aware of these issues and take steps to ensure that you’re using the technology responsibly and ethically. 

It skirts the plagiarism issue

AI creates content by drawing on a large library of information that’s already been created, but is it plagiarizing? Could there be instances where ChatGPT “borrows” from previous work and places it into your work without citing it? Schools and universities today are wrestling with this question of what’s plagiarism and what’s not when it comes to AI-generated work.

To demonstrate this, one Elon University professor gave his class an assignment: Ask ChatGPT to write an essay for you, and then grade it yourself. 

“Many students expressed shock and dismay upon learning the AI could fabricate bogus information,” he writes, adding that he expected some essays to contain errors, but all of them did. 

His students were disappointed that “major tech companies had pushed out AI technology without ensuring that the general population understands its drawbacks” and were concerned about how many embraced such a flawed tool.

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How to Use AI as a Tool to Support Your Work

As more students are discovering, generative AI models like ChatGPT just aren’t as advanced or intelligent as they may believe. While AI may be a poor option for writing your essay, it can be a great tool to support your work.

Generate ideas for essays

Have ChatGPT help you come up with ideas for essays. For example, input specific prompts, such as, “Please give me five ideas for essays I can write on topics related to WWII,” or “Please give me five ideas for essays I can write comparing characters in twentieth century novels.” Then, use what it provides as a starting point for your original research.

Generate outlines

You can also use ChatGPT to help you create an outline for an essay. Ask it, “Can you create an outline for a five paragraph essay based on the following topic” and it will create an outline with an introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion, and a suggested thesis statement. Then, you can expand upon the outline with your own research and original thought.

Generate titles for your essays

Titles should draw a reader into your essay, yet they’re often hard to get right. Have ChatGPT help you by prompting it with, “Can you suggest five titles that would be good for a college essay about [topic]?”

The Benefits of Writing Your Essays Yourself

Asking a robot to write your essays for you may seem like an easy way to get ahead in your studies or save some time on assignments. But, outsourcing your work to ChatGPT can negatively impact not just your grades, but your ability to communicate and think critically as well. It’s always the best approach to write your essays yourself.

Create your own ideas

Writing an essay yourself means that you’re developing your own thoughts, opinions, and questions about the subject matter, then testing, proving, and defending those thoughts. 

When you complete school and start your career, projects aren’t simply about getting a good grade or checking a box, but can instead affect the company you’re working for — or even impact society. Being able to think for yourself is necessary to create change and not just cross work off your to-do list.

Building a foundation of original thinking and ideas now will help you carve your unique career path in the future.

Develop your critical thinking and analysis skills

In order to test or examine your opinions or questions about a subject matter, you need to analyze a problem or text, and then use your critical thinking skills to determine the argument you want to make to support your thesis. Critical thinking and analysis skills aren’t just necessary in school — they’re skills you’ll apply throughout your career and your life.

Improve your research skills

Writing your own essays will train you in how to conduct research, including where to find sources, how to determine if they’re credible, and their relevance in supporting or refuting your argument. Knowing how to do research is another key skill required throughout a wide variety of professional fields.

Learn to be a great communicator

Writing an essay involves communicating an idea clearly to your audience, structuring an argument that a reader can follow, and making a conclusion that challenges them to think differently about a subject. Effective and clear communication is necessary in every industry.

Be impacted by what you’re learning about : 

Engaging with the topic, conducting your own research, and developing original arguments allows you to really learn about a subject you may not have encountered before. Maybe a simple essay assignment around a work of literature, historical time period, or scientific study will spark a passion that can lead you to a new major or career.

Resources to Improve Your Essay Writing Skills

While there are many rewards to writing your essays yourself, the act of writing an essay can still be challenging, and the process may come easier for some students than others. But essay writing is a skill that you can hone, and students at Harvard Summer School have access to a number of on-campus and online resources to assist them.

Students can start with the Harvard Summer School Writing Center , where writing tutors can offer you help and guidance on any writing assignment in one-on-one meetings. Tutors can help you strengthen your argument, clarify your ideas, improve the essay’s structure, and lead you through revisions. 

The Harvard libraries are a great place to conduct your research, and its librarians can help you define your essay topic, plan and execute a research strategy, and locate sources. 

Finally, review the “ The Harvard Guide to Using Sources ,” which can guide you on what to cite in your essay and how to do it. Be sure to review the “Tips For Avoiding Plagiarism” on the “ Resources to Support Academic Integrity ” webpage as well to help ensure your success.

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The Future of AI in the Classroom

ChatGPT and other generative AI models are here to stay, so it’s worthwhile to learn how you can leverage the technology responsibly and wisely so that it can be a tool to support your academic pursuits. However, nothing can replace the experience and achievement gained from communicating your own ideas and research in your own academic essays.

About the Author

Jessica A. Kent is a freelance writer based in Boston, Mass. and a Harvard Extension School alum. Her digital marketing content has been featured on Fast Company, Forbes, Nasdaq, and other industry websites; her essays and short stories have been featured in North American Review, Emerson Review, Writer’s Bone, and others.

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How ChatGPT (and other AI chatbots) can help you write an essay

ChatGPT  is capable of doing many different things very well, with one of the biggest standout features being its ability to compose all sorts of text within seconds, including songs, poems, bedtime stories, and essays . 

The chatbot's writing abilities are not only fun to experiment with, but can help provide assistance with everyday tasks. Whether you are a student, a working professional, or just getting stuff done, we constantly take time out of our day to compose emails, texts, posts, and more. ChatGPT can help you claim some of that time back by helping you brainstorm and then compose any text you need. 

How to use ChatGPT to write: Code | Excel formulas | Resumes  | Cover letters  

Contrary to popular belief, ChatGPT can do much more than just write an essay for you from scratch (which would be considered plagiarism). A more useful way to use the chatbot is to have it guide your writing process. 

Below, we show you how to use ChatGPT to do both the writing and assisting, as well as some other helpful writing tips. 

How ChatGPT can help you write an essay

If you are looking to use ChatGPT to support or replace your writing, here are five different techniques to explore. 

It is also worth noting before you get started that other AI chatbots can output the same results as ChatGPT or are even better, depending on your needs.

Also: The best AI chatbots of 2024: ChatGPT and alternatives

For example,  Copilot  has access to the internet, and as a result, it can source its answers from recent information and current events. Copilot also includes footnotes linking back to the original source for all of its responses, making the chatbot a more valuable tool if you're writing a paper on a more recent event, or if you want to verify your sources.

Regardless of which AI chatbot you pick, you can use the tips below to get the most out of your prompts and from AI assistance.

1. Use ChatGPT to generate essay ideas

Before you can even get started writing an essay, you need to flesh out the idea. When professors assign essays, they generally give students a prompt that gives them leeway for their own self-expression and analysis. 

As a result, students have the task of finding the angle to approach the essay on their own. If you have written an essay recently, you know that finding the angle is often the trickiest part -- and this is where ChatGPT can help. 

Also: ChatGPT vs. Copilot: Which AI chatbot is better for you?

All you need to do is input the assignment topic, include as much detail as you'd like -- such as what you're thinking about covering -- and let ChatGPT do the rest. For example, based on a paper prompt I had in college, I asked:

Can you help me come up with a topic idea for this assignment, "You will write a research paper or case study on a leadership topic of your choice." I would like it to include Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid, and possibly a historical figure. 

Also: I'm a ChatGPT pro but this quick course taught me new tricks, and you can take it for free

Within seconds, the chatbot produced a response that provided me with the title of the essay, options of historical figures I could focus my article on, and insight on what information I could include in my paper, with specific examples of a case study I could use. 

2. Use the chatbot to create an outline

Once you have a solid topic, it's time to start brainstorming what you actually want to include in the essay. To facilitate the writing process, I always create an outline, including all the different points I want to touch upon in my essay. However, the outline-writing process is usually tedious. 

With ChatGPT, all you have to do is ask it to write the outline for you. 

Also: Thanks to my 5 favorite AI tools, I'm working smarter now

Using the topic that ChatGPT helped me generate in step one, I asked the chatbot to write me an outline by saying: 

Can you create an outline for a paper, "Examining the Leadership Style of Winston Churchill through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

After a couple of seconds, the chatbot produced a holistic outline divided into seven different sections, with three different points under each section. 

This outline is thorough and can be condensed for a shorter essay or elaborated on for a longer paper. If you don't like something or want to tweak the outline further, you can do so either manually or with more instructions to ChatGPT. 

As mentioned before, since Copilot is connected to the internet, if you use Copilot to produce the outline, it will even include links and sources throughout, further expediting your essay-writing process. 

3. Use ChatGPT to find sources

Now that you know exactly what you want to write, it's time to find reputable sources to get your information. If you don't know where to start, you can just ask ChatGPT. 

Also: How to make ChatGPT provide sources and citations

All you need to do is ask the AI to find sources for your essay topic. For example, I asked the following: 

Can you help me find sources for a paper, "Examining the Leadership Style of Winston Churchill through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

The chatbot output seven sources, with a bullet point for each that explained what the source was and why it could be useful. 

Also:   How to use ChatGPT to make charts and tables

The one caveat you will want to be aware of when using ChatGPT for sources is that it does not have access to information after 2021, so it will not be able to suggest the freshest sources. If you want up-to-date information, you can always use Copilot. 

Another perk of using Copilot is that it automatically links to sources in its answers. 

4. Use ChatGPT to write an essay

It is worth noting that if you take the text directly from the chatbot and submit it, your work could be considered a form of plagiarism since it is not your original work. As with any information taken from another source, text generated by an AI should be clearly identified and credited in your work.

Also: ChatGPT will now remember its past conversations with you (if you want it to)

In most educational institutions, the penalties for plagiarism are severe, ranging from a failing grade to expulsion from the school. A better use of ChatGPT's writing features would be to use it to create a sample essay to guide your writing. 

If you still want ChatGPT to create an essay from scratch, enter the topic and the desired length, and then watch what it generates. For example, I input the following text: 

Can you write a five-paragraph essay on the topic, "Examining the Leadership Style of Winston Churchill through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

Within seconds, the chatbot gave the exact output I required: a coherent, five-paragraph essay on the topic. You could then use that text to guide your own writing. 

Also: ChatGPT vs. Microsoft Copilot vs. Gemini: Which is the best AI chatbot?

At this point, it's worth remembering how tools like ChatGPT work : they put words together in a form that they think is statistically valid, but they don't know if what they are saying is true or accurate. 

As a result, the output you receive might include invented facts, details, or other oddities. The output might be a useful starting point for your own work, but don't expect it to be entirely accurate, and always double-check the content. 

5. Use ChatGPT to co-edit your essay

Once you've written your own essay, you can use ChatGPT's advanced writing capabilities to edit the piece for you. 

You can simply tell the chatbot what you want it to edit. For example, I asked ChatGPT to edit our five-paragraph essay for structure and grammar, but other options could have included flow, tone, and more. 

Also: AI meets AR as ChatGPT is now available on the Apple Vision Pro

Once you ask the tool to edit your essay, it will prompt you to paste your text into the chatbot. ChatGPT will then output your essay with corrections made. This feature is particularly useful because ChatGPT edits your essay more thoroughly than a basic proofreading tool, as it goes beyond simply checking spelling. 

You can also co-edit with the chatbot, asking it to take a look at a specific paragraph or sentence, and asking it to rewrite or fix the text for clarity. Personally, I find this feature very helpful. 

How to use ChatGPT

The best ai chatbots: chatgpt isn't the only one worth trying, chatgpt is finally revealing its sources - but there's a catch.

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How to Use ChatGpt to Rewrite Content: 5 Key Prompts | “Rewriting Existing Text with ChatGPT AI: Essential Tips and Tricks”

• 7 July 2023 7 July 2023

Table of Contents

Introduction

When you surf the web on how to use ChatGpt to rewrite content, it seems like no one has covered this topic extensively, right? Well, don’t worry, we aren’t parroting anyone. Instead, we’re here to guide you on an uncharted path. This article is designed to provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to use ChatGPT prompts to rewrite existing content efficiently. Thanks to AI technology, rewriting content has never been easier. Practical? Yes. Useful? Absolutely. With AI, not only do you save time, but the content you rewrite will also have a unique flavour, making it stand out from the crowd.

“Discover the Benefits of ChatGPT: Rewriting Text with AI Prompts”

A. avoiding plagiarism:.

Ever caught yourself walking a thin line between ‘inspired by’ and ‘copied from’? This is where content rewriting plays a crucial role. By using ChatGPT prompts, you can artfully dodge plagiarism. This task allows you to cherry-pick key ideas and concepts from the original text, pour them into your creative mould, and present the content in a fresh, original manner. Now, isn’t that a smarter way to work?

B. Adapting to a specific audience:

We all know the power of a well-tailored suit. It’s the same with content. If you can sew the threads of language, style, and tone into a perfect fit for your audience, you’re onto a winner. Using ChatGPT to rewrite your content gives you the chance to customize your narrative to resonate with your readers. You can refine the text using conversational AI and boost audience engagement. It’s like creating a YouTube video, where you tailor the script to fit your audience. You’re no longer just a writer, but a rewriter creating a user experience that’s out of this world.

How to Use ChatGpt to Rewrite Content: 5 Key Prompts

Write your responses in English! [INSTRUCTIONS]: I would like to make modifications to this [text]. Generate a table containing five potential writing styles that relate to the [text], with numbers in the left column for me to choose from. Ask after the table, “What writing style would you like to use to rewrite the text? Choose one from the previous table.” below the table. Implement INSTRUCTIONS in a table format!

text = I am ed

I want you to be an English Content rewriter, a grammar checker, and a better writer.  I will give you some English text. rewrite it and put it in the English version of my work that has been fixed and better.  I want you to change my simple A0-level words and sentences with more beautiful and elegant upper-level English words and sentences.  Maintain the original meaning, but rewrite them in a more standard style. I want you to respond solely to the correction and the suggested enhancements; please do not provide any explanations. 

Text: I am Ed, I like playing cricket

Prompts #3, 4, and 5

Hey there! I totally get what you’re thinking. I’ve only mentioned two key ChatGPT prompts so far, but trust me, there’s so much more to discover in the vast universe of ChatGPT. It’s like a hidden treasure chest waiting to be unlocked, and guess what? I’ve got three more prompts up my sleeve! Sound intriguing? Well, get ready for an exciting adventure! Hop on this link NO B.S CHATGPT PROMPTS and dive right in—it won’t cost you a dime.

Let me tell you, this brainchild of OpenAI is a powerhouse with mind-blowing capabilities. You’ll find yourself exclaiming, “Damn, I never knew AI could do this!” in no time. Don’t miss out on this thrilling rollercoaster ride into the world of AI—it’s definitely worth it. Trust me on this!

Common Mistakes to Avoid while Using ChatGPT for Rewriting

Ready to rewrite with ChatGPT? Evade common pitfalls, mate! Over-reliance on this AI model developed by OpenAI? No good! It can help you rewrite but don’t forget – final human editing for that polish. Want to rewrite but are confused by the ChatGpt app? Simplicity is key, so don’t be fancy with prompts.

Remember, ChatGPT isn’t just a language model, it’s a powerful tool, and using it smartly can enhance your writing style. The best way to rewrite? Let’s suggest ChatGPT to revise, and improve the quality of your content. Remember, learning how to use it well is your strategy for top-notch content. Isn’t it amazing what AI can do for us now?

Hey, you made it! We’ve covered some unique ways to exploit ChatGPT, the language model developed by OpenAI. It’s an impressive tool, isn’t it? Not just another app, but a genuine strategy to enhance your content creation. It can rephrase existing text, improve the quality of your writing, and even revise or redraft content without losing that human-like touch. Isn’t that a game-changer? But remember, AI is powerful, but it isn’t perfect. Nothing beats a human eye for that final polish. So, whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned content creator, use ChatGPT as an assistant. But never, ever forget the vital role of your expertise. Ready to rewrite the rule book?

FAQ’s

Can chatgpt pass ai and plagiarism detectors.

ChatGPT is a powerful AI language model, but it is not specifically designed to evade AI and plagiarism detectors. While skilful prompt crafting might help bypass some detection systems, intentionally evading such detectors goes against ethical guidelines and the principles of responsible AI use.

Can ChatGPT be used to rewrite content in multiple languages, or is it limited to specific languages?

Yes, ChatGPT can be used to improve and paraphrase content in multiple languages. While its training is primarily focused on English, it can still generate responses and rephrase text in other languages to some extent. However, the quality and accuracy of the results may vary depending on the specific language, as the model’s proficiency in languages other than English is limited.

Is it legal and ethical to use ChatGPT for content rewriting purposes?

Using AI tools like ChatGPT for content rewriting raises concerns about originality and ethical practices. Google’s focus is on providing unique and valuable content, discouraging the use of paraphrased material.

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• 08 April 2024

Three ways ChatGPT helps me in my academic writing

• Dritjon Gruda 0

Dritjon Gruda is an invited associate professor of organizational behavior at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon, the Católica Porto Business School and the Research Centre in Management and Economics.

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For Dritjon Gruda, artificial-intelligence chatbots have been a huge help in scientific writing and peer review. Credit: Vladimira Stavreva-Gruda

Confession time: I use generative artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the debate over whether chatbots are positive or negative forces in academia, I use these tools almost daily to refine the phrasing in papers that I’ve written, and to seek an alternative assessment of work I’ve been asked to evaluate, as either a reviewer or an editor. AI even helped me to refine this article.

I study personality and leadership at Católica Porto Business School in Portugal and am an associate editor at Personality and Individual Differences and Psychology of Leaders and Leadership. The value that I derive from generative AI is not from the technology itself blindly churning out text, but from engaging with the tool and using my own expertise to refine what it produces. The dialogue between me and the chatbot both enhances the coherence of my work and, over time, teaches me how to describe complex topics in a simpler way.

Whether you’re using AI in writing, editing or peer review, here’s how it can do the same for you.

Polishing academic writing

Ever heard the property mantra, ‘location, location, location’? In the world of generative AI, it’s ‘context, context, context’.

Context is king. You can’t expect generative AI — or anything or anyone, for that matter — to provide a meaningful response to a question without it. When you’re using a chatbot to refine a section of your paper for clarity, start by outlining the context. What is your paper about, and what is your main argument? Jot down your ideas in any format — even bullet points will work. Then, present this information to the generative AI of your choice. I typically use ChatGPT, made by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, but for tasks that demand a deep understanding of language nuances, such as analysing search queries or text, I find Gemini, developed by researchers at Google, to be particularly effective. The open-source large language models made by Mixtral, based in Paris, are ideal when you’re working offline but still need assistance from a chatbot.

Regardless of which generative-AI tool you choose, the key to success lies in providing precise instructions. The clearer you are, the better. For example, you might write: “I’m writing a paper on [topic] for a leading [discipline] academic journal. What I tried to say in the following section is [specific point]. Please rephrase it for clarity, coherence and conciseness, ensuring each paragraph flows into the next. Remove jargon. Use a professional tone.” You can use the same technique again later on, to clarify your responses to reviewer comments.

Remember, the chatbot’s first reply might not be perfect — it’s a collaborative and iterative process. You might need to refine your instructions or add more information, much as you would when discussing a concept with a colleague. It’s the interaction that improves the results. If something doesn’t quite hit the mark, don’t hesitate to say, “This isn’t quite what I meant. Let’s adjust this part.” Or you can commend its improvements: “This is much clearer, but let’s tweak the ending for a stronger transition to the next section.”

This approach can transform a challenging task into a manageable one, filling the page with insights you might not have fully gleaned on your own. It’s like having a conversation that opens new perspectives, making generative AI a collaborative partner in the creative process of developing and refining ideas. But importantly, you are using the AI as a sounding board: it is not writing your document for you; nor is it reviewing manuscripts.

Elevating peer review

Generative AI can be a valuable tool in the peer-review process. After thoroughly reading a manuscript, summarize key points and areas for review. Then, use the AI to help organize and articulate your feedback (without directly inputting or uploading the manuscript’s text, thus avoiding privacy concerns). For example, you might instruct the AI: “Assume you’re an expert and seasoned scholar with 20+ years of academic experience in [field]. On the basis of my summary of a paper in [field], where the main focus is on [general topic], provide a detailed review of this paper, in the following order: 1) briefly discuss its core content; 2) identify its limitations; and 3) explain the significance of each limitation in order of importance. Maintain a concise and professional tone throughout.”

I’ve found that AI partnerships can be incredibly enriching; the tools often offer perspectives I hadn’t considered. For instance, ChatGPT excels at explaining and justifying the reasons behind specific limitations that I had identified in my review, which helps me to grasp the broader implications of the study’s contribution. If I identify methodological limitations, ChatGPT can elaborate on these in detail and suggest ways to overcome them in a revision. This feedback often helps me to connect the dots between the limitations and their collective impact on the paper’s overall contribution. Occasionally, however, its suggestions are off-base, far-fetched, irrelevant or simply wrong. And that is why the final responsibility for the review always remains with you. A reviewer must be able to distinguish between what is factual and what is not, and no chatbot can reliably do that.

Optimizing editorial feedback

The final area in which I benefit from using chatbots is in my role as a journal editor. Providing constructive editorial feedback to authors can be challenging, especially when you oversee several manuscripts every week. Having personally received countless pieces of unhelpful, non-specific feedback — such as, “After careful consideration, we have decided not to proceed with your manuscript” — I recognize the importance of clear and constructive communication. ChatGPT has become indispensable in this process, helping me to craft precise, empathetic and actionable feedback without replacing human editorial decisions.

For instance, after evaluating a paper and noting its pros and cons, I might feed these into ChatGPT and get it to draft a suitable letter: “On the basis of these notes, draft a letter to the author. Highlight the manuscript’s key issues and clearly explain why the manuscript, despite its interesting topic, might not provide a substantial enough advancement to merit publication. Avoid jargon. Be direct. Maintain a professional and respectful tone throughout.” Again, it might take a few iterations to get the tone and content just right.

I’ve found that this approach both enhances the quality of my feedback and helps to guarantee that I convey my thoughts supportively. The result is a more positive and productive dialogue between editors and authors.

There is no doubt that generative AI presents challenges to the scientific community. But it can also enhance the quality of our work. These tools can bolster our capabilities in writing, reviewing and editing. They preserve the essence of scientific inquiry — curiosity, critical thinking and innovation — while improving how we communicate our research.

Considering the benefits, what are you waiting for?

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01042-3

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged .

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Using AI tools

Using ChatGPT to Write a College Essay | Tips & Examples

Published on June 26, 2023 by Koen Driessen . Revised on December 8, 2023.

A good college essay helps to distinguish your application from those of other candidates. It conveys your experiences, values, and character traits and indicates why you would make a good addition to the university you’re applying to.

Your college essay should be your own work. However, AI tools like ChatGPT may be helpful during the preparation and revision stages of your writing.

You can also use the essay checker , so you don’t have to revise your writing yourself.

You can use these tools to:

• Brainstorm essay ideas
• Develop an outline
• Generate feedback

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Table of contents

Brainstorming ideas, developing an outline, generating feedback, limitations of using chatgpt, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions.

Your college essay topic should reveal something distinctive about your personality and have a unique angle.

Brainstorming a range of potential ideas is a good place to start. This can help to stimulate creative thinking and prompt self-reflection. It can also help you draw connections between seemingly unrelated experiences or ideas.

You can use ChatGPT to generate questions to help you brainstorm.

Example: Using ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas

• Generate 10 questions to help me brainstorm topics for my college admission essay.
• How has a particular life experience shaped your perspective on a specific issue or topic?
• What challenges or obstacles have you faced, and how have they influenced your personal growth?
• How has your involvement in extracurricular activities impacted your character development and contributed to your identity?
• In what ways have you demonstrated leadership skills and made a positive impact on your community?
• Describe a significant academic achievement or project that showcases your intellectual curiosity and passion.
• How have your cultural background and family values influenced your aspirations and goals for the future?
• Reflect on a time when you had to step outside of your comfort zone to achieve a meaningful outcome. What did you learn from this experience?
• How do you envision using your education to make a difference in the world or contribute to a specific field or industry?
• What do you believe sets you apart from other applicants, and how would your unique perspective enrich the college community?
• Discuss a book, artwork, or scientific discovery that has profoundly impacted your thinking and helped shape your intellectual interests.

Check for common mistakes

Use the best grammar checker available to check for common mistakes in your text.

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College admission essays don’t follow one predefined structure, so you can approach them creatively and incorporate storytelling techniques.

Two common approaches to structuring your essay are the narrative structure (a chronological narrative that shows your character development over time) and the vignette or montage structure (multiple scenes connected by a common topic or theme).

Regardless of the structure you choose, it’s important to establish a coherent narrative and ensure that your essay flows smoothly.

You can use ChatGPT as a source of inspiration and to generate potential ideas on how to structure your college essay . Do this by prompting the tool to create an outline using your chosen topic. You can make the prompt as specific as you like, mentioning any facts or viewpoints that should be incorporated into the output.

Examples: Using ChatGPT to generate an essay outline

• Provide a very short outline for a college admission essay. The essay will be about my experience working at an animal shelter. The essay will be 500 words long.
• Hook: Share a brief and engaging anecdote about your experience at the animal shelter.
• Thesis statement: Working at an animal shelter has been a transformative experience, teaching me valuable lessons about compassion, resilience, and community impact.
• Describe your first impressions and emotions upon starting work at the shelter.
• Discuss the challenges you encountered, such as the condition of the animals or the emotional toll of their situations.
• Highlight the relationships you formed with the animals and their impact on you.
• Discuss specific instances where you witnessed the transformative power of love and care on the animals’ well-being.
• Explore the collaborative efforts within the shelter community.
• Discuss how working with others led to positive outcomes and inspired you to make a difference.
• Reflect on how working at the shelter has shaped your character and values.
• Discuss the skills and lessons learned that are applicable beyond the shelter environment.
• Connect your experiences to your future goals and aspirations.
• Summarize the main points discussed in the essay.
• Reinforce the transformative nature of your experience and your commitment to making a positive impact in the future.

You can use ChatGPT to help revise your essay before submitting it to ensure that it’s of a high quality. However, ChatGPT cannot provide the same kind of informed feedback as a human, and it’s not able to adequately judge qualities such as vulnerability and authenticity. For this reason, it’s important to also ask for feedback from two to three people who have experience with college essays and who know you well.

Nevertheless, you can use ChatGPT to generate feedback on certain aspects, such as consistency of tone, clarity of structure, and grammar and punctuation. You can also use  Scribbr’s free paraphrasing tool to help vary the tone of your writing and Scribbr’s free grammar checker to ensure your text is free of grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors.

Alternatively, you can seek the advice of a human essay coach or editor. We recommend using Scribbr’s essay editing service .

Example: Using ChatGPT to get feedback

• Provide constructive feedback on how to improve the above essay with regard to appropriateness of tone, clarity of structure, and grammar and punctuation.
• The tone of the essay is generally appropriate, conveying a sense of personal growth and passion. However, consider injecting more enthusiasm and emotion into certain parts of the essay to make it more engaging and captivating.
• The overall structure of the essay is clear and follows a logical progression. However, it would benefit from a stronger introduction that hooks the reader and clearly outlines the main points to be discussed.
• Consider using clear topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph to provide a preview of the main idea or argument that will be presented.
• Pay attention to subject-verb agreement and verb tenses throughout the essay to ensure consistency.
• Proofread the essay to eliminate any repetitive phrases or sentences.
• Check for the correct use of commas and other punctuation marks, ensuring they are used appropriately to enhance clarity and flow.

Additionally, here are a few constructive suggestions for improvement:

• Expand on the ways in which working at the animal shelter influenced your future aspirations and academic/professional pursuits.
• Be mindful of using diverse vocabulary and sentence structures to enhance the overall quality of the essay.

While ChatGPT can help you brainstorm, outline, and revise your essay, having it write your essay for you can negatively impact your application in several ways.

Unoriginal content

ChatGPT responses are based on a wide range of sources and sometimes resemble existing texts. Furthermore, they are not always unique, since other users may receive the same responses to similar prompts.

As the point of a college essay is to showcase your unique experiences and perspective and make you stand out from other candidates, having ChatGPT write your essay is not a good idea.

Formulaic style

ChatGPT outputs don’t reflect your personality, are highly formulaic, and contain many clichés (e.g., outputs often use hackneyed phrases like “burning desire,” “insatiable curiosity,” and “thirst for knowledge”).

Furthermore, ChatGPT outputs often “tell” rather than “show” (i.e., they state a fact instead of illustrating it using examples and vivid imagery).

Lack of personal insight

Human-written text tends to be more unpredictable and contain more creative language choices than AI-generated writing.

While the connections you make in your writing should not be nonsensical, drawing unique and unexpected connections between different experiences can help show character development and display your creativity and critical thinking skills.

ChatGPT can’t do this. Furthermore, it can’t express authentic emotion or vulnerability about specific memories that are, after all, your memories, not ChatGPT’s.

Risk of plagiarism

Passing off AI-generated text as your own work is usually considered plagiarism (or at least academic dishonesty ). AI detectors may be used to detect this offense.

It’s highly unlikely that a university will accept your application if you are caught submitting an AI-generated college essay.

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If you want more tips on using AI tools , understanding plagiarism , and citing sources , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations, examples, and formats.

• Citing ChatGPT
• Best grammar checker
• Best paraphrasing tool
• ChatGPT in your studies
• Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Academic integrity
• Best plagiarism checker

Citing sources

• Citation styles
• In-text citation
• Citation examples
• Annotated bibliography

No, having ChatGPT write your college essay can negatively impact your application in numerous ways. ChatGPT outputs are unoriginal and lack personal insight.

Furthermore, Passing off AI-generated text as your own work is considered academically dishonest . AI detectors may be used to detect this offense, and it’s highly unlikely that any university will accept you if you are caught submitting an AI-generated admission essay.

However, you can use ChatGPT to help write your college essay during the preparation and revision stages (e.g., for brainstorming ideas and generating feedback).

Yes, you use ChatGPT to help write your college essay by having it generate feedback on certain aspects of your work (consistency of tone, clarity of structure, etc.).

However, ChatGPT is not able to adequately judge qualities like vulnerability and authenticity. For this reason, it’s important to also ask for feedback from people who have experience with college essays and who know you well. Alternatively, you can get advice using Scribbr’s essay editing service .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Driessen, K. (2023, December 08). Using ChatGPT to Write a College Essay | Tips & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved April 9, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/ai-tools/chatgpt-college-essay/

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How to Use ChatGPT to Write Essays That Impress

Step 1: Use ChatGPT to Find and Refine Essay Topics

• Log into the service and type the following prompt into ChatGPT:

• As you can see, ChatGPT gave several good ideas for our essay. If you want to refine the idea further, you can ask the chatbot to cut out some parts of the idea and replace them. Or, you can ask for more context in certain parts. Example – “Expand more on topic number 5 and what it means.”

Step 2: Ask ChatGPT to Construct an Outline

• With the same chat open, type out “ Give me an essay outline for <selected topic>. Make sure to keep it structured as I’ll use it to write my essay .” In this case, I will use topic number 2 since it aligns with what I had in mind.

• As you can see above, we now have a structured outline for our essay. We can use this to write our essay or have ChatGPT do that job. Nonetheless, it’s a good starting point. As always, you can have the AI chatbot cut out parts of the outline or specifically add new ones depending on your requirement.

Step 3: Get ChatGPT to Cite Sources for Your Essay

Even though we have the idea and the outline, we will need to do our research for proof supporting our essay. Thankfully, ChatGPT can be of some help here. Since the chatbot is adept at moderate research, users can get a general idea of where to look for gathering information. Let’s begin doing that.

• Let’s begin asking ChatGPT for sources. With the same chat open, type in the following prompt:

• Now we have a list of 10 sources we can reference from. However, you can also see that ChatGPT mentions the year 2021 in some of them. Therefore, it’s best to use these websites but navigate to the latest pages pertaining to your essay for research. This applies to every topic, so always do it. Also, chatbots like ChatGPT have a habit of hallucinating and making up information, so do be careful.

Step 4: Have ChatGPT Write the Essay

• In the same chat, type the following prompt – “With the topic and outline available to you, generate a 700-word essay. Make sure to keep it structured and concise yet informational. Also, keep in mind my target audience is <Insert target audience> so cater to that accordingly.”
• In the middle of the essay, ChatGPT might stop and not answer. Simply type “ Continue ,” and it will finish the rest of the essay.

Step 5: Edit the Essay with ChatGPT

No matter if you have used ChatGPT to draft a complete essay or have written one yourself, you can use this step to make ChatGPT your co-editor and grammar checker. While your essay might need an initial look from a human, you can definitely use the bot to hash out the tone and add little details.

• Either open up the same chat or have your essay already in the clipboard. With that done, type out the following prompt:

Step 6: Export the Essay for Submission

However, for those who want to export the essay into a more aesthetic format, we have just the thing for you. There is no shortage of best ChatGPT Chrome extensions on the internet right now. We have one such selection linked in our list that can export selective chats onto beautiful image formats if you want to show off your essay. Check it out and let us know how you liked it.

Bonus: ChatGPT and AI Apps to Write Essays

1. writesonic.

Ryter is another helpful AI writing assistant that not only helps with essays but all types of articles. The service is powered by a language model that gives it intelligence. Rytr comes with 40+ different use cases and 20+ writing tones for all types of written material. For those who don’t want to stick to English, it even comes with support for 30+ languages.

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Combining his love for Literature and Tech, Upanishad dived into the world of technology journalism with fire. Now he writes about anything and everything while keeping a keen eye on his first love of gaming. Often found chronically walking around the office.

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ChatGPT can write your essays, but should you use it?

Published on March 12, 2023

With the rising popularity of online writing tools, you may be wondering: can I use ChatGPT to write my essays? If you’ve never used the chatbot, it can generate several paragraphs of text within a matter of seconds. That’s certainly faster than any human can type, but there are many limitations to using it too. Here’s everything you need to know about how ChatGPT fares at writing essays and whether you should use it.

ChatGPT can write essays, but it isn't always the best choice as it suffers from a few technical limitations. Additionally, you may want to avoid using it if your work will be graded or judged in any capacity.

JUMP TO KEY SECTIONS

Can ChatGPT write student essays?

Can professors tell if you use chatgpt.

• Should you use ChatGPT to write an essay?

How to use ChatGPT to write an essay

Yes, ChatGPT can write you an essay as it has been trained on a wide range of text. However, there are some downsides to using it for that purpose. For one, it lacks logical reasoning and critical thinking, qualities that are critical to writing an essay.

Generally speaking, writing an essay involves researching the topic, structuring your thoughts in a way that makes logical sense, and writing it in a convincing manner. ChatGPT can help you with each of these stages separately. However, it cannot fully replace a human presenting their own knowledge and opinion in an essay.

As for the actual writing part, ChatGPT can indeed generate an essay that looks and sounds like a human wrote it. However, the output is usually verbose and a bit simplistic, making it stand out in a professional setting. There are ways around this, however, as we’ll discuss in a later section. Some may also argue it’s unethical to use AI-generated text in essays as it doesn’t represent your views and thoughts.

So can you use ChatGPT to write essays responsibly? Absolutely — you can use it to detect spelling and grammatical mistakes in your own text. Likewise, ChatGPT can help with brainstorming new ideas or finding key points and angles.

For example, I asked ChatGPT to provide some potential angles on an essay titled “The negative effects of social media on society”. It told me that I could discuss how social media impacts mental health, aids the spread of misinformation and enables echo chambers. Finally, I requested ChatGPT to provide an outline that takes those points into consideration, which gave me a starting point for the essay.

Yes, teachers and professors now have access to online tools that can detect AI-generated text. Chatbots like ChatGPT work by using a machine learning-based model to predict future words using statistical probability. Humans, on the other hand, tend to piece together words much more randomly. So with a little bit of knowledge about how ChatGPT works, it’s not hard to weed out AI-generated text.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, already has an AI classifier that detects whether or not a certain piece of text was written by a computer. Likewise, GPTZero provides professors with plagiarism scores for text. It also highlights sentences that it suspects have been written by an AI. These tools become increasingly accurate as the length of the text increases, so it’s harder to evade detection if you’re using ChatGPT to write longer essays.

Should I use ChatGPT to write an essay?

Generally speaking, you should not use ChatGPT to write an essay for school for the simple reason that you cannot pass off someone else’s work as yours. Moreover, many educational institutions have strict policies against plagiarism. Using ChatGPT to write an essay may be viewed as a breach of academic integrity. Some boards, including New York City’s public schools, have explicitly banned ChatGPT on student networks and devices for this very reason.

If you writing a research paper, you’ll also need to properly cite your sources. And as you may already know, ChatGPT cannot provide citations or links to external sources as it doesn’t have access to the internet. In fact, that’s one of the major differences between ChatGPT and Bing Chat — the latter provides sources for factual statements. Unfortunately, the latter’s Creative only includes a handful of sources — not enough to use in a professional piece of literature.

Without citations, you also cannot guarantee the accuracy of ChatGPT’s responses. That’s likely not a problem if you’re writing an essay on a well-known concept. However, the chatbot can quickly go off the rails when it’s writing about obscure topics.

ChatGPT’s underlying GPT-3 language model was only trained on a limited number of text samples. That likely didn’t include organic chemistry, regional laws, and philosophical debates to name a few. In other words, it might not fare well in a liberal arts setting. ChatGPT will rarely turn you down if you force it to write about something it doesn’t know much about, but it will likely respond with fictional or made-up information.

If you want ChatGPT to write a high-quality essay, you’ll need to provide a clear input prompt. If you provide a single keyword, like “global warming”, you’ll get a generic output. To avoid this, you can offer more specific terms and topics that you need to be included in your essay. For example, you could use the prompt “Write an essay on global warming and its effects on Australian wildfires” to add some context.

In case you’ve never used ChatGPT before, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use it:

• Go to the ChatGPT website .
• Click Sign up and create a new account with your email address.
• Once logged in, you’ll see a text box at the bottom of the page. This is where you enter your prompts.
• From this point, you can ask ChatGPT to write an essay on just about any subject you can think of. Remember to be as specific as possible. If you need to include certain ideas, specify them in the input prompt.

With longer essays, you might run into ChatGPT’s hidden character limit before it can generate the whole text. If that happens, simply ask the chatbot to continue from where it left off. Alternatively, you can ask ChatGPT to write an outline for your essay before generating it one section at a time.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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5 Ways ChatGPT Can Improve, Not Replace, Your Writing

It's been quite a year for ChatGPT, with the large language model (LLM) now taking exams, churning out content , searching the web, writing code, and more. The AI chatbot can produce its own stories , though whether they're any good is another matter.

If you're in any way involved in the business of writing, then tools like ChatGPT have the potential to complete up-end the way you work—but at this stage, it's not inevitable that journalists, authors, and copywriters will be replaced by generative AI bots.

What we can say with certainty is that ChatGPT is a reliable writing assistant, provided you use it in the right way. If you have to put words in order as part of your job, here's how ChatGPT might be able to take your writing to the next level—at least until it replaces you, anyway.

Using a thesaurus as a writer isn't particularly frowned on; using ChatGPT to come up with the right word or phrase shouldn’t be either. You can use the bot to look for variations on a particular word, or get even more specific and say you want alternatives that are less or more formal, longer or shorter, and so on.

Where ChatGPT really comes in handy is when you're reaching for a word and you're not even sure it exists: Ask about "a word that means a sense of melancholy but in particular one that comes and goes and doesn't seem to have a single cause" and you'll get back "ennui" as a suggestion (or at least we did).

If you have characters talking, you might even ask about words or phrases that would typically be said by someone from a particular region, of a particular age, or with particular character traits. This being ChatGPT, you can always ask for more suggestions.

Julian Chokkattu

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ChatGPT is never short of ideas.

Whatever you might think about the quality and character of ChatGPT's prose, it's hard to deny that it's quite good at coming up with ideas . If your powers of imagination have hit a wall then you can turn to ChatGPT for some inspiration about plot points, character motivations, the settings of scenes, and so on.

This can be anything from the broad to the detailed. Maybe you need ideas about what to write a novel or an article about—where it's set, what the context is, and what the theme is. If you're a short story writer, perhaps you could challenge yourself to write five tales inspired by ideas from ChatGPT.

Alternatively, you might need inspiration for something very precise, whether that's what happens next in a scene or how to summarize an essay. At whatever point in the process you get writer's block, then ChatGPT might be one way of working through it.

Writing is often about a lot more than putting words down in order. You'll regularly have to look up facts, figures, trends, history, and more to make sure that everything is accurate (unless your next literary work is entirely inside a fantasy world that you're imagining yourself).

ChatGPT can sometimes have the edge over conventional search engines when it comes to knowing what food people might have eaten in a certain year in a certain part of the world, or what the procedure is for a particular type of crime. Whereas Google might give you SEO-packed spam sites with conflicting answers, ChatGPT will actually return something coherent.

That said, we know that LLMs have a tendency to “hallucinate” and present inaccurate information—so you should always double-check what ChatGPT tells you with a second source to make sure you're not getting something wildly wrong.

Getting fictional character and place names right can be a challenge, especially when they're important to the plot. A name has to have the right vibe and the right connotations, and if you get it wrong it really sticks out on the page.

ChatGPT can come up with an unlimited number of names for people and places in your next work of fiction, and it can be a lot of fun playing around with this too. The more detail you give about a person or a place, the better—maybe you want a name that really reflects a character trait for example, or a geographical feature.

The elements of human creation and curation aren't really replaced, because you're still weighing up which names work and which don't, and picking the right one—but getting ChatGPT on the job can save you a lot of brainstorming time.

Get your names right with ChatGPT.

With a bit of cutting and pasting, you can quickly get ChatGPT to review your writing as well: It'll attempt to tell you if there's anything that doesn't make sense, if your sentences are too long, or if your prose is too lengthy.

From spotting spelling and grammar mistakes to recognizing a tone that's too formal, ChatGPT has plenty to offer as an editor and critic. Just remember that this is an LLM, after all, and it doesn't actually “know” anything—try to keep a reasonable balance between accepting ChatGPT's suggestions and giving it too much control.

If you're sharing your work with ChatGPT, you can also ask it for better ways to phrase something, or suggestions on how to change the tone—though this gets into the area of having the bot actually do your writing for you, which all genuine writers would want to avoid.

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How-To Geek

How to use chatgpt to transform writing into another format.

You can easily convert stories, scripts, and other documents into new formats with a little AI assistance.

Quick Links

Getting your text into chatgpt, working in chunks and prompting chatgpt, example 1: turning a blog post into a youtube script, example 2: changing a technical document into a popular article, example 3: turning a short story into a movie script, what to watch out for.

While most people think of ChatGPT as a way to generate new text, one of its most powerful abilities is to transform existing text into another format. Whether this is text that you have written, or text from another source.

The first step in transforming your written content with ChatGPT is to input your original text. This process is straightforward. When prompted, you simply copy and paste your text into the text field.

Keep in mind that ChatGPT is not a mind reader. It uses patterns in the data to generate responses based on the input it's been given. The better your input, the better the output.

Related: What Is ChatGPT Plus?

That being said, I have copied some pretty broken text into ChatGPT and the results were great. For example, copying the entire auto-transcribed chat history of a Microsoft Teams Meeting into ChatGPT and having it write a concise meeting report works surprisingly well.

ChatGPT can only process a certain amount of "tokens" at a time. If your content exceeds this limit, you need to break it down into smaller chunks. ChatGPT will let you know if a prompt was too long, but I've used a method where I prompt ChatGPT with something like "I'm going to give you text in multiple chunks, don't do anything with it, just read it for now." and then paste in the text in multiple parts.

Related: Does ChatGPT Have an App?

Also, the way you prompt ChatGPT matters. If you want to transform your text into a different format, be clear about your intentions. For example, if you want to convert a blog post into a YouTube script, you might preface your text with, "Please convert the following blog post into a script suitable for a YouTube video."

Hopefully, that all makes sense, but we're going to walk through a few practical examples to demonstrate exactly how this works.

Let's take one of yours truly's most popular articles Why Don't We Have 128-Bit Computers Yet? as an example. First, here's the prompt:

Please convert the following blog post into a friendly script suitable for a YouTube video:

Then copy all the text from the article into the prompt after the colon before submitting it.

Now submit the prompt.

ChatGPT will transform the content accordingly, ensuring it's engaging, casual, and interactive to suit the YouTube video format. Remember to revise the output to make sure it includes a clear introduction, body, and conclusion, as well as calls-to-action and engagement prompts typical of YouTube content.

How well does this work? Well, I host a small YouTube channel , and for the past few months I've been using ChatGPT to convert the blog articles each video is based on into a YouTube script format. This is exactly what I had been doing by hand before, except now it takes seconds rather than an hour or two of my time.

As with the other examples you'll see below, a major advantage of having ChatGPT transform text rather than generate it, is that you don't have to worry about it making stuff up that wasn't in the original text. You still need to quality-control the transformed text , but I have yet to encounter a situation where ChatGPT added anything into my scripts that were not in the original text.

Technical documents often involve jargon and complexity that may not be accessible to a general audience. Here, ChatGPT can help.

Prompt ChatGPT as follows:

Please convert the following technical document into a popular article accessible to the general public, with no background in the field:

Now we need some highly-technical information. Why not none other than Albert Einstein? I don't know about you, but I definitely don't have the smarts to understand Einstein's work, so why not try it with one of his papers? Specifically, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies , the 1905 paper that made him famous, where he outlined his Theory of Relativity. You might have heard of that one.

The paper is 24 pages long, so we'll just put a section into ChatGPT for this exercise.

If you're a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you can make use of the beta plugins store , which includes ChatWithPDF , a plugin that lets you load a PDF and then interact with it using ChatGPT. This may be a more efficient way to get complex technical PDFs into the Chatbot.

The resulting output should be a reader-friendly article that conveys the essence of the technical document in simpler terms. Remember that you can prompt ChatGPT to write text at a particular level, such as a specific grade level in school.

With ChatGPT, you can even turn a short story into a movie script. Input your short story and prompt the model like so:

Please convert the following short story into a movie script, maintaining the essence of the characters and plot.

If we head over to Project Gutenberg , there are many books that are public domain in the USA and many other parts of the world. Its a worthy project that relies on donations, so while you're visiting and you like what they do, it never hurts to give some support!

For this exercise, we're going with the ever-dependable Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Anderson . Specifically, The Emperor's New Suit.

Don't forget that you can be very specific in your prompt, asking ChatGPT to alter the tone or transform the story somehow. You can also specify what sort of script format you want. For example, a spec script or a shooting script.

While ChatGPT is unlikely to produce something of final usable quality right off the bat, it's much easier to edit a script than format and write one from scratch. It's a great way to extract the parts of the story relevant to the script, such as separating dialogue from inner thoughts, or descriptions of locations.

While ChatGPT is a powerful tool, it isn't infallible. It can sometimes produce errors or generate responses that aren't entirely accurate . Be prepared to review and revise the output. It's also important to remember that while ChatGPT can simplify and convert text, it doesn't inherently understand context.

Use the output of ChatGPT as a first draft and then refine it, using your human judgment to ensure accuracy, context, and quality. Consider ChatGPT a writing assistant rather than a replacement for human creativity and nuance.

Related: 8 Surprising Things You Can Do With ChatGPT

ChatGPT offers exciting possibilities for content repurposing, automating some of the work of transforming and simplifying text. While it doesn't replace the human touch, it makes writing more efficient and interesting. This way you can spend more time being creative, and less time doing simple drudge work.

How to use ChatGPT for writing

AI can make you a better writer, if you know how to get the best from it

Summarizing other works

Worldbuilding, creating outlines, building characters, how to improve your chatgpt responses.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm in a very short period of time, as users continue to test the boundaries of what the AI chatbot can accomplish. And so far, that's a lot. 

Some of it is negative, of course: for instance Samsung workers accidentally leaking top-secret data while using ChatGPT , or the AI chatbot being used for malware scams . Plagiarism is also rampant, with the use of ChatGPT for writing college essays a potential problem.

However, while ChatGPT can and has been used for wrongdoing, to the point where the Future of Life Institution released an open letter calling for the temporary halt of OpenAI system work , AI isn’t all bad. Far from it.

For a start, anyone who writes something may well have used AI to enhance their work already. The most common applications, of course, are the grammar and spelling correction tools found in everything from email applications to word processors. But there are a growing number of other examples of how AI can be used for writing. So, how do you bridge the gap between using AI as the tool it is, without crossing over into plagiarism city?

In fact, there are many ways ChatGPT can be used to enhance your skills, particularly when it comes to researching, developing, and organizing ideas and information for creative writing. By using AI as it was intended - as a tool, not a crutch - it can enrich your writing in ways that help to better your craft, without resorting to it doing everything for you. 

Below, we've listed some of our favorite ways to use ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots for writing. 

A key part of any writing task is the research, and thanks to the internet that chore has never been easier to accomplish. However, while finding the general sources you need is far less time-consuming than it once was, actually parsing all that information is still the same slog it’s always been. But this is where ChatGPT comes in. You can use the AI bot to do the manual labor for you and then reap the benefits of having tons of data to use for your work.

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The steps are slightly different, depending on whether you want an article or book summarized . 

For the article, there are two ways to have ChatGPT summarize it. The first requires you to type in the words ‘TLDR:’ and then paste the article’s URL next to it. The second method is a bit more tedious, but increases the accuracy of your summary. For that, you’ll need to copy and paste the article itself into the prompt . 

Summarizing a book is much easier, as long as it was published before 2021. Simply type into the prompt ‘summarize [book title]’ and it should do the rest for you.

This should go without saying, but for any articles or books, make sure you read the source material first before using any information presented to you. While ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool that can create resources meant for future reference, it’s not a perfect one and is subject to accidentally inserting misinformation into anything it gives you.

One of the most extensive and important tasks when crafting your creative work is to properly flesh out the world your characters occupy. Even for works set in a regular modern setting, it can take plenty of effort to research the various cultures, landmarks, languages, and neighborhoods your characters live in and encounter. 

Now, imagine stories that require their own unique setting, and how much more work that entails in terms of creating those same details from scratch. While it’s vital that the main ideas come from you, using ChatGPT can be a great way to streamline the process, especially with more tedious details.

For instance, if you need certain fictional words without wanting to create an entirely fictional language, you can prompt ChatGPT with the following : “Create a language including an alphabet, phonetics, grammar, and the most common 100 words. Base it on [insert real-life languages here]” and it will give you some good starting points. However, it’s imperative that you take these words and look them up, to ensure you aren’t appropriating sensitive terms or using offensive real-life words.

Another example is useful for those who write scenarios for games, especially tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Cthulhu . Dungeon Masters (who run the games) may often need to create documents or other fake materials for their world, but doing so takes a lot of time and effort. Now, they can prompt ChatGPT to quickly create filler text that sounds interesting or authentic but is inherently useless; it's essentially like ' Lorem Ipsum ' text, but more immersive.

When writing a story, many people will use an outline to ensure they stay on track and that the narrative flows well. But actually sitting down and organizing everything in your head in order to create a cohesive reference is a lot more daunting than it seems. It’s one of those steps that can be crucial to a well-structured work of fiction, but it can also become a hurdle. This is another area where ChatGPT can come in handy.

The key to writing an effective outline is remembering that you don’t need to have all the answers first. It’s there to structure your content, by helping you hit critical points and not miss important details in the process. While there are AI generators with a more specific focus on this topic, ChatGPT will do a good job at taking a general prompt and returning points for you to keep in mind while you research and write around that topic.

For instance, I prompted ChatGPT with “I want to write a story about a black woman in 16th century England” and it gave me a well-thought-out series of steps to help me create a story that would reflect my topic. An outline such as this would be particularly useful for those needing a resource they can quickly turn to for inspiration when writing. After that, you can begin to develop more complex ideas and have the AI organize those specifics into much easier-to-follow steps.

What makes any great story are the characters that inhabit it. Writing strong, fleshed-out characters is the cornerstone of any creative work and, naturally, the process of creating such a character can be difficult. Their background, manner of speech, goals, dreams, look, and more must be carefully considered and planned out. And this is another aspect of writing that ChatGPT can aid with, if you know how to go about it.

A basic way to use ChatGPT in this regard is to have it generate possible characters that could populate whatever setting you’re writing for. For example, I prompted it with “Provide some ideas for characters set in 1920s Harlem” and it gave me a full list of people with varied and distinctive backstories to use as a jumping-off point. Each character is described with a single sentence, enough to help start the process of creating them, but still leaving the crux of developing them up to me.

One of the most interesting features of ChatGPT is that you can flat-out roleplay with a character, whether they're a historical figure or one that you created but need help fleshing out. Take that same character you just created and have a conversation with them by asking them questions on their history, family life, profession, etc. Based on my previous results, I prompted with “Pretend to be a jazz musician from 1920s Harlem. Let's have a conversation.” I then asked questions from there, basing them on prior answers. Of course, from there you need to parse through these responses to filter out unnecessary or inaccurate details, while fleshing out what works for your story, but it does provide you with a useful stepping stone.

If you’re having issues getting the results you want, the problem could be with how you’re phrasing those questions or prompts in the first place. We've got a full guide to how to improve your ChatGPT prompts and responses , but here are a few of the best options:

• Specify the direction you want the AI to go, by adding in relevant details 
• Prompt from a specific role to guide the responses in the proper direction
• Make sure your prompts are free of typos and grammatical errors
• Keep your tone conversational, as that’s how ChatGPT was built
• Learn from yours and its mistakes to make it a better tool
• Break up your conversations into 500 words or less, as that’s when the AI begins to break down and go off topic
• If you need something clarified, ask the AI based on its last response
• Ask it to cite sources and then check those sources
• Sometimes it’s best to start fresh with a brand new conversation

Of course, many of the above suggestions apply not just to ChatGPT but also to the other chatbots springing up in its wake. Check out our list of the best ChatGPT alternatives and see which one works best for you.

Named by the CTA as a CES 2023 Media Trailblazer, Allisa is a Computing Staff Writer who covers breaking news and rumors in the computing industry, as well as reviews, hands-on previews, featured articles, and the latest deals and trends. In her spare time you can find her chatting it up on her two podcasts, Megaten Marathon and Combo Chain, as well as playing any JRPGs she can get her hands on.

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Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, can you use chatgpt for your college essay.

College Admissions , College Essays

ChatGPT has become a popular topic of conversation since its official launch in November 2022. The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot can be used for all sorts of things, like having conversations, answering questions, and even crafting complete pieces of writing.

If you’re applying for college, you might be wondering about ChatGPT college admissions’ potential.  Should you use a ChatGPT college essay in your application ? 

By the time you finish reading this article, you’ll know much more about ChatGPT, including how students can use it responsibly and if it’s a good idea to use ChatGPT on college essays . We’ll answer all your questions, like:

• What is ChatGPT and why are schools talking about it?
• What are the good and bad aspects of ChatGPT?
• Should you use ChatGPT for college essays and applications?
• Can colleges detect ChatGPT?
• Are there other tools and strategies that students can use, instead?

We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s get started!

Schools and colleges are worried about how new AI technology affects how students learn. (Don't worry. Robots aren't replacing your teachers...yet.)

What Is ChatGPT and Why Are Schools Talking About It?

ChatGPT (short for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer”) is a chatbot created by OpenAI , an artificial intelligence research company. ChatGPT can be used for various tasks, like having human-like conversations, answering questions, giving recommendations, translating words and phrases—and writing things like essays. 

In order to do this, ChatGPT uses a neural network that’s been trained on thousands of resources to predict relationships between words. When you give ChatGPT a task, it uses that knowledge base to interpret your input or query. It then analyzes its data banks to predict the combinations of words that will best answer your question. 

So while ChatGPT might seem like it’s thinking, it’s actually pulling information from hundreds of thousands of resources , then answering your questions by looking for patterns in that data and predicting which words come next.  

Why Schools Are Concerned About ChatGPT

Unsurprisingly, schools are worried about ChatGPT and its misuse, especially in terms of academic dishonesty and plagiarism . Most schools, including colleges, require students’ work to be 100% their own. That’s because taking someone else’s ideas and passing them off as your own is stealing someone else’s intellectual property and misrepresenting your skills. 

The problem with ChatGPT from schools’ perspective is that it does the writing and research for you, then gives you the final product. In other words, you’re not doing the work it takes to complete an assignment when you’re using ChatGPT , which falls under schools’ plagiarism and dishonesty policies.  

Colleges are also concerned with how ChatGPT will negatively affect students’ critical thinking, research, and writing skills . Essays and other writing assignments are used to measure students’ mastery of the material, and if students submit ChatGPT college essays, teachers will just be giving feedback on an AI’s writing…which doesn’t help the student learn and grow. 

Beyond that, knowing how to write well is an important skill people need to be successful throughout life. Schools believe that if students rely on ChatGPT to write their essays, they’re doing more than just plagiarizing—they’re impacting their ability to succeed in their future careers. 

Many Schools Have Already Banned ChatGPT

Schools have responded surprisingly quickly to AI use, including ChatGPT. Worries about academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and mis/disinformation have led many high schools and colleges to ban the use of ChatGPT . Some schools have begun using AI-detection software for assignment submissions, and some have gone so far as to block students from using ChatGPT on their internet networks. 

It’s likely that schools will begin revising their academic honesty and plagiarism policies to address the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. You’ll want to stay up-to-date with your schools’ policies. 

ChatGPT is pretty amazing...but it's not a great tool for writing college essays. Here's why.

ChatGPT: College Admissions and Entrance Essays

College admissions essays—also called personal statements—ask students to explore important events, experiences, and ideas from their lives. A great entrance essay will explain what makes you you !  

ChatGPT is a machine that doesn’t know and can’t understand your experiences. That means using ChatGPT to write your admissions essays isn’t just unethical. It actually puts you at a disadvantage because ChatGPT can’t adequately showcase what it means to be you. 

Let’s take a look at four ways ChatGPT negatively impacts college admissions essays.

#1: ChatGPT Lacks Insight

We recommend students use u nexpected or slightly unusual topics because they help admissions committees learn more about you and what makes you unique. The chat bot doesn’t know any of that, so nothing ChatGPT writes can’t accurately reflect your experience, passions, or goals for the future. 

Because ChatGPT will make guesses about who you are, it won’t be able to share what makes you unique in a way that resonates with readers. And since that’s what admissions counselors care about, a ChatGPT college essay could negatively impact an otherwise strong application.  

#2: ChatGPT Might Plagiarize 

Writing about experiences that many other people have had isn’t a very strong approach to take for entrance essays . After all, you don’t want to blend in—you want to stand out! 

If you write your essay yourself and include key details about your past experiences and future goals, there’s little risk that you’ll write the same essay as someone else. But if you use ChatGPT—who’s to say someone else won’t, too? Since ChatGPT uses predictive guesses to write essays, there’s a good chance the text it uses in your essay already appeared in someone else’s.  

Additionally, ChatGPT learns from every single interaction it has. So even if your essay isn’t plagiarized, it’s now in the system. That means the next person who uses ChatGPT to write their essay may end up with yours. You’ll still be on the hook for submitting a ChatGPT college essay, and someone else will be in trouble, too.

#3: ChatGPT Doesn’t Understand Emotion 

Keep in mind that ChatGPT can’t experience or imitate emotions, and so its writing samples lack, well, a human touch ! 

A great entrance essay will explore experiences or topics you’re genuinely excited about or proud of . This is your chance to show your chosen schools what you’ve accomplished and how you’ll continue growing and learning, and an essay without emotion would be odd considering that these should be real, lived experiences and passions you have!

#4: ChatGPT Produced Mediocre Results

If you’re still curious what would happen if you submitted a ChatGPT college essay with your application, you’re in luck. Both Business Insider and Forbes asked ChatGPT to write a couple of college entrance essays, and then they sent them to college admissions readers to get their thoughts. 

The readers agreed that the essays would probably pass as being written by real students—assuming admissions committees didn’t use AI detection software—but that they both were about what a “very mediocre, perhaps even a middle school, student would produce.” The admissions professionals agreed that the essays probably wouldn’t perform very well with entrance committees, especially at more selective schools.  

That’s not exactly the reaction you want when an admission committee reads your application materials! So, when it comes to ChatGPT college admissions, it’s best to steer clear and write your admission materials by yourself. 

Can Colleges Detect ChatGPT?

We’ve already explained why it’s not a great idea to use ChatGPT to write your college essays and applications , but you may still be wondering: can colleges detect ChatGPT? 

In short, yes, they can! 

Software Can Detect ChatGPT

As technology improves and increases the risk of academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and mis/disinformation, software that can detect such technology is improving, too. For instance, OpenAI, the same company that built ChatGPT, is working on a text classifier that can tell the difference between AI-written text and human-written text .  

Turnitin, one of the most popular plagiarism detectors used by high schools and universities, also recently developed the AI Innovation Lab —a detection software designed to flag submissions that have used AI tools like ChatGPT. Turnitin says that this tool works with 98% confidence in detecting AI writing. 

Plagiarism and AI companies aren’t the only ones interested in AI-detection software. A 22-year old computer science student at Princeton created an app to detect ChatGPT writing, called Zero GPT. This software works by measuring the complexity of ideas and variety of sentence structures.  

Human Readers Can Detect ChatGPT 

It’s also worth keeping in mind that teachers can spot the use of ChatGPT themselves , even if it isn’t confirmed by a software detector. For example, if you’ve turned in one or two essays to your teacher already, they’re probably familiar with your unique writing style. If you submit a college essay draft essay that uses totally different vocabulary, sentence structures, and figures of speech, your teacher will likely take note.

Additionally , admissions committees and readers may be able to spot ChatGPT writing, too. ChatGPT (and AI writing, in general) uses more simplistic sentence structures with less variation, so that could make it easier to tell if you’ve submitted a ChatGPT college essay. These professionals also read thousands of essays every year, which means they know what a typical essay reads like. You want your college essay to catch their attention…but not because you used AI software! 

If you use ChatGPT responsibly, you can be as happy as these kids.

Pros and Cons of ChatGPT: College Admissions Edition

ChatGPT is a brand new technology, which means we’re still learning about the ways it can benefit us. It’s important to think about the pros and the cons to any new tool …and that includes artificial intelligence!

Let’s look at some of the good—and not-so-good—aspects of ChatGPT below. 

ChatGPT: The Good

It may seem like we’re focused on just the negatives of using ChatGPT in this article, but we’re willing to admit that the chatbot isn’t all bad. In fact, it can be a very useful tool for learning if used responsibly !

Like we already mentioned, students shouldn’t use ChatGPT to write entire essays or assignments. They can use it, though, as a learning tool alongside their own critical thinking and writing skills.

Students can use ChatGPT responsibly to:

• Learn more about a topic . It’s a great place to get started for general knowledge and ideas about most subjects.
• Find reputable and relevant sources on a topic. Students can ask ChatGPT for names and information about leading scholars, relevant websites and databases, and more. 
• Brainstorm ideas for assignments. Students can share the ideas they already have with ChatGPT, and in return, the chatbot can suggest ideas for further exploration and even organization of their points.
• Check work (that they’ve written themselves!) for errors or cla rity. This is similar to how spell- and grammar-checking software is used. ChatGPT may be even better than some competitors for this, because students can actually ask ChatGPT to explain the errors and their solutions—not just to fix them. 

Before you use ChatGPT—even for the tasks mentioned above—you should talk to your teacher or school about their AI and academic dishonesty policies. It’s also a good idea to include an acknowledgement that you used ChatGPT with an explanation of its use. 

This guy made some bad decisions using ChatGPT. Don't be this guy.

ChatGPT: The Bad

The first model of ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) was formally introduced to the public in November 2022, and the newer model (GPT-4) in March 2023. So, it’s still very new and there’s a lot of room for improvement .  

There are many misconceptions about ChatGPT. One of the most extreme is that the AI is all-knowing and can make its own decisions. Another is that ChatGPT is a search engine that, when asked a question, can just surf the web for timely, relevant resources and give you all of that information. Both of these beliefs are incorrect because ChatGPT is limited to the information it’s been given by OpenAI . 

Remember how the ‘PT’ in ChatGPT stands for “Pre-trained”? That means that every time OpenAI gives ChatGPT an update, it’s given more information to work with (and so it has more information to share with you). In other words, it’s “trained” on information so it can give you the most accurate and relevant responses possible—but that information can be limited and biased . Ultimately, humans at OpenAI decide what pieces of information to share with ChatGPT, so it’s only as accurate and reliable as the sources it has access to.

For example, if you were to ask ChatGPT-3.5 what notable headlines made the news last week, it would respond that it doesn’t have access to that information because its most recent update was in September 2021!

You’re probably already familiar with how easy it can be to come across misinformation, misleading and untrue information on the internet. Since ChatGPT can’t tell the difference between what is true and what isn’t, it’s up to the humans at OpenAI to make sure only accurate and true information is given to the chatbot . This leaves room for human error , and users of ChatGPT have to keep that in mind when using and learning from the chatbot.

These are just the most obvious problems with ChatGPT. Some other problems with the chatbot include:

• A lack of common sense. ChatGPT can create seemingly sensical responses to many questions and topics, but it doesn’t have common sense or complete background knowledge.
• A lack of empathy. ChatGPT doesn’t have emotions, so it can’t understand them, either. 
• An inability to make decisions or problem solve . While the chatbot can complete basic tasks like answering questions or giving recommendations, it can’t solve complex tasks. 

While there are some great uses for ChatGPT, it’s certainly not without its flaws.

Our bootcamp can help you put together amazing college essays that help you get into your dream schools—no AI necessary.

What Other Tools and Strategies Can Help Students Besides ChatGPT?

While it’s not a good idea to use ChatGPT for college admissions materials, it’s not the only tool available to help students with college essays and assignments. 

One of the best strategies students can use to write good essays is to make sure they give themselves plenty of time for the assignment. The writing process includes much more than just drafting! Having time to brainstorm ideas, write out a draft, revise it for clarity and completeness, and polish it makes for a much stronger essay. 

Teachers are another great resource students can use, especially for college application essays. Asking a teacher (or two!) for feedback can really help students improve the focus, clarity, and correctness of an essay. It’s also a more interactive way to learn—being able to sit down with a teacher to talk about their feedback can be much more engaging than using other tools. 

Using expert resources during the essay writing process can make a big difference, too. Our article outlines a complete list of strategies for students writing college admission essays. It breaks down what the Common Application essay is, gives tips for choosing the best essay topic, offers strategies for staying focused and being specific, and more.  

You can also get help from people who know the college admissions process best, like former admissions counselors. PrepScholar’s Admissions Bootcamp guides you through the entire application process , and you’ll get insider tips and tricks from real-life admissions counselors that’ll make your applications stand out. Even better, our bootcamp includes step-by-step essay writing guidance , so you can get the help you need to make sure your essay is perfect.  

If you’re hoping for more technological help, Grammarly is another AI tool that can check writing for correctness. It can correct things like misused and misspelled words and grammar mistakes, and it can improve your tone and style. 

It’s also widely available across multiple platforms through a Windows desktop app, an Android and iOS app, and a Google Chrome extension. And since Grammarly just checks your writing without doing any of the work for you, it’s totally safe to use on your college essays. 

The Bottom Line: ChatGPT College Admissions and Essays

ChatGPT will continue to be a popular discussion topic as it continues evolving. You can expect your chosen schools to address ChatGPT and other AI tools in their academic honesty and plagiarism policies in the near future—and maybe even to restrict or ban the use of the chatbot for school admissions and assignments.

As AI continues transforming, so will AI-detection. The goal is to make sure that AI is used responsibly by students so that they’re avoiding plagiarism and building their research, writing, and critical thinking skills. There are some great uses for ChatGPT when used responsibly, but you should always check with your teachers and schools beforehand.

ChatGPT’s “bad” aspects still need improving, and that’s going to take some time.Be aware that the chatbot isn’t even close to perfect, and it needs to be fact-checked just like other sources of information.

Similarly to other school assignments, don’t submit a ChatGPT college essay for college applications, either. College entrance essays should outline unique and interesting personal experiences and ideas, and those can only come from you.  

Just because ChatGPT isn’t a good idea doesn’t mean there aren’t resources to help you put together a great college essay. There are many other tools and strategies you can use instead of ChatGPT , many of which have been around for longer and offer better feedback. 

What’s Next?

Ready to write your college essays the old-fashioned way? Start here with our comprehensive guide to the admissions essays. 

Most students have to submit essays as part of their Common Application . Here's a complete breakdown of the Common App prompts —and how to answer them. 

The most common type of essay answers the "why this college?" prompt. We've got an expert breakdown that shows you how to write a killer response , step by step. 

Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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How to Get ChatGPT to Write an Essay: Prompts, Outlines, & More

Last Updated: March 31, 2024 Fact Checked

Getting ChatGPT to Write the Essay

Using ai to help you write, expert interview.

This article was written by Bryce Warwick, JD and by wikiHow staff writer, Nicole Levine, MFA . Bryce Warwick is currently the President of Warwick Strategies, an organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area offering premium, personalized private tutoring for the GMAT, LSAT and GRE. Bryce has a JD from the George Washington University Law School. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 45,061 times.

Are you curious about using ChatGPT to write an essay? While most instructors have tools that make it easy to detect AI-written essays, there are ways you can use OpenAI's ChatGPT to write papers without worrying about plagiarism or getting caught. In addition to writing essays for you, ChatGPT can also help you come up with topics, write outlines, find sources, check your grammar, and even format your citations. This wikiHow article will teach you the best ways to use ChatGPT to write essays, including helpful example prompts that will generate impressive papers.

Things You Should Know

• To have ChatGPT write an essay, tell it your topic, word count, type of essay, and facts or viewpoints to include.
• ChatGPT is also useful for generating essay topics, writing outlines, and checking grammar.
• Because ChatGPT can make mistakes and trigger AI-detection alarms, it's better to use AI to assist with writing than have it do the writing.

• Before using the OpenAI's ChatGPT to write your essay, make sure you understand your instructor's policies on AI tools. Using ChatGPT may be against the rules, and it's easy for instructors to detect AI-written essays.
• While you can use ChatGPT to write a polished-looking essay, there are drawbacks. Most importantly, ChatGPT cannot verify facts or provide references. This means that essays created by ChatGPT may contain made-up facts and biased content. [1] X Research source It's best to use ChatGPT for inspiration and examples instead of having it write the essay for you.

• The topic you want to write about.
• Essay length, such as word or page count. Whether you're writing an essay for a class, college application, or even a cover letter , you'll want to tell ChatGPT how much to write.
• Other assignment details, such as type of essay (e.g., personal, book report, etc.) and points to mention.
• If you're writing an argumentative or persuasive essay , know the stance you want to take so ChatGPT can argue your point.
• If you have notes on the topic that you want to include, you can also provide those to ChatGPT.
• When you plan an essay, think of a thesis, a topic sentence, a body paragraph, and the examples you expect to present in each paragraph.
• It can be like an outline and not an extensive sentence-by-sentence structure. It should be a good overview of how the points relate.

• "Write a 2000-word college essay that covers different approaches to gun violence prevention in the United States. Include facts about gun laws and give ideas on how to improve them."
• This prompt not only tells ChatGPT the topic, length, and grade level, but also that the essay is personal. ChatGPT will write the essay in the first-person point of view.
• "Write a 4-page college application essay about an obstacle I have overcome. I am applying to the Geography program and want to be a cartographer. The obstacle is that I have dyslexia. Explain that I have always loved maps, and that having dyslexia makes me better at making them."

• In our essay about gun control, ChatGPT did not mention school shootings. If we want to discuss this topic in the essay, we can use the prompt, "Discuss school shootings in the essay."
• Let's say we review our college entrance essay and realize that we forgot to mention that we grew up without parents. Add to the essay by saying, "Mention that my parents died when I was young."
• In the Israel-Palestine essay, ChatGPT explored two options for peace: A 2-state solution and a bi-state solution. If you'd rather the essay focus on a single option, ask ChatGPT to remove one. For example, "Change my essay so that it focuses on a bi-state solution."

• "Give me ideas for an essay about the Israel-Palestine conflict."
• "Ideas for a persuasive essay about a current event."
• "Give me a list of argumentative essay topics about COVID-19 for a Political Science 101 class."

• "Create an outline for an argumentative essay called "The Impact of COVID-19 on the Economy."
• "Write an outline for an essay about positive uses of AI chatbots in schools."
• "Create an outline for a short 2-page essay on disinformation in the 2016 election."

• "Find peer-reviewed sources for advances in using MRNA vaccines for cancer."
• "Give me a list of sources from academic journals about Black feminism in the movie Black Panther."
• "Give me sources for an essay on current efforts to ban children's books in US libraries."

• "Write a 4-page college paper about how global warming is changing the automotive industry in the United States."
• "Write a 750-word personal college entrance essay about how my experience with homelessness as a child has made me more resilient."
• You can even refer to the outline you created with ChatGPT, as the AI bot can reference up to 3000 words from the current conversation. [3] X Research source For example: "Write a 1000 word argumentative essay called 'The Impact of COVID-19 on the United States Economy' using the outline you provided. Argue that the government should take more action to support businesses affected by the pandemic."

• One way to do this is to paste a list of the sources you've used, including URLs, book titles, authors, pages, publishers, and other details, into ChatGPT along with the instruction "Create an MLA Works Cited page for these sources."
• You can also ask ChatGPT to provide a list of sources, and then build a Works Cited or References page that includes those sources. You can then replace sources you didn't use with the sources you did use.

Expert Q&A

• Because it's easy for teachers, hiring managers, and college admissions offices to spot AI-written essays, it's best to use your ChatGPT-written essay as a guide to write your own essay. Using the structure and ideas from ChatGPT, write an essay in the same format, but using your own words. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Always double-check the facts in your essay, and make sure facts are backed up with legitimate sources. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• If you see an error that says ChatGPT is at capacity , wait a few moments and try again. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

• Using ChatGPT to write or assist with your essay may be against your instructor's rules. Make sure you understand the consequences of using ChatGPT to write or assist with your essay. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• ChatGPT-written essays may include factual inaccuracies, outdated information, and inadequate detail. [4] X Research source Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about completing school assignments, check out our in-depth interview with Bryce Warwick, JD .

• ↑ https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6783457-what-is-chatgpt
• ↑ https://platform.openai.com/examples/default-essay-outline
• ↑ https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6787051-does-chatgpt-remember-what-happened-earlier-in-the-conversation
• ↑ https://www.ipl.org/div/chatgpt/

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How to Use ChatGPT to Write an Essay

Essay writing is a fundamental skill that students and professionals alike rely on to convey ideas, argue points, and communicate effectively. However, the process of crafting a well-written essay can be daunting, requiring careful planning, research, and organization. In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a valuable tool to aid in various aspects of writing, including generating ideas, providing feedback, and assisting with editing. One such AI model is ChatGPT, a language generation model developed by OpenAI. In this article, we will explore how to use ChatGPT to write an essay and enhance the writing process, from brainstorming ideas to refining your final draft.

⚡️⚡️⚡️Boost your productivity with ChatGPT prompts ⚡️⚡️⚡️

Introduction to Using ChatGPT for Essay Writing

While ChatGPT is primarily known for its conversational abilities, its versatility extends to assisting with more complex tasks such as essay writing. Leveraging ChatGPT for essay writing can streamline the writing process, provide inspiration, and offer valuable insights into structuring and refining your essays.

Here's how to make ChatGPT write an essay effectively:

• Generating ideas
• Outlining your essay
• Crafting the introduction
• Developing the thesis statement
• Summarizing the essay
• Editing and refining

ChatGPT for Essays - Reality or Wasted Time?

Before diving into the specifics of using ChatGPT for essay writing, it's essential to address the question of its efficacy and reliability. Some may argue that relying on AI for essay writing undermines the development of critical thinking and writing skills. However, proponents of using ChatGPT contend that it can serve as a valuable tool for generating ideas, providing guidance, and offering feedback. In fact, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize essay writing by assisting with research, brainstorming, outlining, drafting, editing, and creativity enhancement. ChatGPT can empower users to write with confidence, clarity, and creativity, whether used for academic purposes or creative pursuits.

Setting Up Your Essay Writing Task with ChatGPT

Setting up your essay writing task with ChatGPT involves framing a clear and concise problem statement that guides the AI model in generating relevant and coherent responses. Here are the principles of crafting a problem statement for ChatGPT:

• Clarity. Clearly define your essay's topic or subject matter to ensure ChatGPT understands the context and scope of the task.
• Specificity. Be specific about what you want ChatGPT to help you with. Whether brainstorming ideas, outlining the essay structure, or refining the thesis statement, provide clear instructions to ChatGPT.
• Relevance. Ensure the problem statement is relevant to your essay writing task and aligns with your goals and objectives.
• Complexity. Tailor the complexity of the problem statement to match the level of assistance you need from ChatGPT. For example, if you're writing a research paper, the problem statement may be more complex than if you're writing a creative essay.

So, how to prompt ChatGPT to write an essay?

Choosing a topic.

The first step in essay writing is selecting a compelling topic that aligns with your interests, expertise, and assignment requirements. ChatGPT can assist in generating topic ideas by providing suggestions, prompts, and relevant information. You can ask ChatGPT to suggest ideas or topics related to a particular subject area or theme. ChatGPT can generate a list of potential topics based on keywords or prompts you provided, you can also use ready-made ChatGPT writing prompts .

Example Prompts

• "Can you suggest some interesting topics related to environmental sustainability?"
• "Outline five current issues in healthcare that would make for a compelling essay?"

Outlining the Essay

Once you have chosen a topic, it's essential to outline your essay to organize your thoughts and structure your argument effectively. ChatGPT can help outline by generating key points, subtopics, and supporting evidence. Ask ChatGPT to write an essay by organizing the structure of your essay and outlining the main sections and their respective subtopics. You can provide ChatGPT with a rough outline of your essay's structure, and it can offer suggestions for arranging the content logically.

• "What are some main points I should cover in my essay on climate change?"
• "Can you help me outline the key arguments for and against social media regulation?"

Writing the Introduction

The introduction sets the tone for your essay and provides context for your argument. ChatGPT can assist in crafting an engaging introduction by generating opening sentences, giving background information, and posing thought-provoking questions. Once you have selected the components for your introduction, edit and refine the text as needed to ensure clarity, coherence, and effectiveness. Make any necessary adjustments to align the introduction with your essay's overall tone and structure. So, how to get ChatGPT to write an essay’s introduction?

• "How should I begin my essay on renewable energy?"
• "I'm struggling to start my essay on artificial intelligence. What are some effective opening lines?"

Thesis Statement Development

The thesis statement articulates the central argument or main idea of your essay. Write essays with ChatGPT by formulating a clear and concise thesis statement, summarizing your argument, and outlining the scope of your essay. Edit and refine the thesis statement as needed to ensure that it accurately reflects the content and objectives of your essay. Make necessary adjustments to clarify language, refine wording, or strengthen the argument.

• "Can you assist me in refining my thesis statement for my essay on the effects of social media on mental health?"
• "I need help crafting a thesis statement for my essay on the role of government in healthcare. How should I phrase it?"

Expanding on Key Points

Once you have established your thesis statement, developing your key points and providing evidence to support your argument is essential. ChatGPT can help expand on key points by generating relevant examples, statistics, and explanations. By working with ChatGPT, you can strengthen your argument and provide compelling evidence to support your claims.

• "What are some real-world examples of companies implementing sustainable business practices for my essay on corporate social responsibility?"
• "Can you provide examples of policies that have successfully reduced carbon emissions for my essay on climate change?"

Summarizing the Essay

In the conclusion of your essay, it's essential to summarize your main points and reiterate your thesis statement. Use ChatGPT to write an essay and get help crafting a concise and impactful conclusion by summarizing the key arguments and highlighting the significance of your findings. By collaborating with ChatGPT, you can create a conclusion that reinforces your argument and leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

• "How should I conclude my essay on globalization?"
• "I'm wrapping up my essay on the future of technology. What key points should I include in the conclusion?"

Editing and Refining Your Essay

After completing a draft of your essay, it's essential to review and refine your writing to ensure clarity, coherence, and effectiveness. ChatGPT can assist in editing and refining your essay by providing feedback on grammar, style, and structure. By collaborating with ChatGPT, you can identify areas for improvement and make revisions to strengthen your writing.

• "Can you review my essay for any grammatical errors or typos?"
• "I want to make my writing more concise. Can you help me identify any unnecessary words or phrases?"

Proofreading Assistance

In addition to editing, proofreading is essential to ensure your essay is free of errors and inconsistencies. ChatGPT can assist in proofreading your essay by identifying spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, and formatting issues. Use ChatGPT to write essays that are polished and professional.

• "Do you have any suggestions for improving the formatting of my essay?"
• "Could you check my essay for any spelling errors or typos?"

Improving Style and Flow

Writing style and flow are crucial aspects of effective essay writing, contributing to readability and engagement. ChatGPT can help improve the style and flow of your essay by suggesting transitions, varying sentence structure, and enhancing language use. By collaborating with ChatGPT, you can elevate the quality of your writing and captivate your audience.

• "How can I improve the transitions between paragraphs in my essay?"
• "Can you suggest ways to vary sentence structure to make my writing more engaging?"

How to Avoid Plagiarism in an Essay with ChatGPT

Plagiarism is a serious academic offense that can have severe consequences for writers. To avoid plagiarism when using ChatGPT, writers should:

• Understand plagiarism and academic integrity principles.
• Use ChatGPT to generate ideas and refine writing, not as a content source.
• Paraphrase and synthesize information generated by ChatGPT in your own words.
• Provide proper citations for any information or ideas derived from external sources.
• Cross-check ChatGPT-generated content with reliable sources to ensure accuracy.
• Review and edit your essay carefully to maintain originality and integrity.

By following these strategies, writers can ensure that their essays are original, well-crafted, and free of plagiarism when using ChatGPT as a writing tool.

Creativity and Originality

Creativity and originality are essential elements of successful essay writing. ChatGPT can help spark creativity and originality by generating unique ideas, perspectives, and insights. By collaborating with ChatGPT, writers can infuse their essays with fresh and innovative content.

• "I'm looking to inject some creativity into my essay. Can you suggest unconventional approaches or ideas?"
• "How can I make my essay stand out and grab the reader's attention?"

Accurate citation of sources

Accurate citation of sources is crucial to give credit to the original authors and avoid plagiarism. Just ask yourself the question: “How do I use ChatGPT to write an essay? If you are using AI solely as an assistant and not as a performer, then there is no need to worry. ChatGPT can assist in accurately citing sources in your essay by guiding citation formats, referencing styles, and bibliographic information. By collaborating with ChatGPT, writers can ensure that their essays adhere to academic standards and properly attribute the ideas and information used. Clearly indicate to ChatGPT which citation style you want to use (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago). This ensures that the generated citations are formatted correctly according to the guidelines of the selected style.

• "Can you help me format my citations according to APA guidelines?"
• "I'm unsure how to cite a source properly. Can you provide an example?"

How to Rewrite Chatgpt Essay

Sometimes, writers may need to rewrite or rephrase sections of their essays to improve clarity, coherence, or uniqueness. ChatGPT can assist in rewriting essays by offering alternative wording, restructuring sentences, and refining language use. You may have a question: "How to get ChatGPT to write longer essays?" The answer is actually obvious - with the help of those same prompts. By collaborating with ChatGPT, writers can enhance the quality of their writing and ensure that their ideas are effectively communicated.

• "I need to rewrite this paragraph for clarity. Can you suggest alternative wording?"
• "How can I rephrase this sentence to make it more concise?"

Balancing ChatGPT Input with Personal Insights

While ChatGPT can provide valuable assistance in essay writing, balancing its input with your own insights and perspectives is essential. ChatGPT can help generate ideas and refine writing, but writers should ensure that their essays reflect their own voice and analysis. By collaborating with ChatGPT while maintaining autonomy as writers, writers can achieve a harmonious balance between AI assistance and personal creativity.

• “Write me an outline, introduction, and conclusion on the topic, and I will write the main part of the essay myself.”

Enhancing Your Writing Skills with ChatGPT

ChatGPT represents a groundbreaking advancement in AI technology that has significant implications for the field of essay writing. By leveraging AI as a learning tool and creative collaborator, you can simply write an essay using ChatGPT and cultivate a growth mindset, deepen your understanding of language and communication, and enhance your writing skills meaningfully. Embrace the opportunities for self-improvement and exploration that ChatGPT offers, and embark on a journey of continuous learning and development as a writer.

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Can ChatGPT Write a Good College-Admissions Essay?

In January, I raised my hourly rate to $300 before wondering if I could get away with charging anything at all.

I teach high-schoolers how to write college essays, helping students claw their way out of hackneyed bildungsroman and into deftly tuned narratives . The clients (and their parents) can be a lot to handle, but my results ensure that I have a new cluster of rising seniors every summer. And the service I provide is in perpetually high demand among the moneyed and desperate private-school crowd.

Recently, though, the rise of ChatGPT had me questioning how much longer this comfortable arrangement could last. I started to fear obsolescence when I heard about uncannily passable AI-generated  letters of recommendation and wedding toasts — forms of writing not a million miles away from my specialty.  So, in an attempt to get to know my new enemy —  and gauge whether I was still employable —  I paid $20 for access to the “more creative” GPT4.

Nervously, I prompted ChatGPT with a series of bullet points and fed it what anyone who has applied to college in the past 15 years knows is the formula for the Common Application personal essay: “Write 600 words including a catchy hook to draw the reader in, a conflict, and a thoughtful self-reflection.”

ChatGPT didn’t even take a beat to process my outline; it spat out an essay as fast as I could read it. Its first draft (about a freak accident washing dishes leading to a lesson in the power of fear) was unsettlingly well-composed, but stiff in a way that kept it from resonating emotionally (often a problem with student-generated drafts, too). ChatGPT wrote, “ I was horrified, not just at the sight of my own blood but also at the thought of needing stitches. In that moment, I was transported back to the time when I was a child and I got my first stitches. ” Not bad, but not exactly transcendent, either.

The next big test: Could this thing incorporate feedback? I replied that the essay was “a little formal, can you make it more conversational?” Done. ChatGPT added a few “ you see ”s and began several sentences with “ So .” The essay was suddenly more casual: “ The experience taught me that fear, no matter how powerful it may seem, can be overcome with perseverance and determination ” became “ But eventually, I realized that this fear was holding me back and preventing me from enjoying something that brought me so much joy. ”

With these small tweaks, ChatGPT’s effort was already significantly better than most first drafts I come across. I tried to throw it off with something random, adding, “My favorite comedian is Jon Stewart. Can you incorporate that into the essay?” ChatGPT wrote three new sentences that explained how Stewart “helped me see the lighter side of things and lifted my spirits.”

I told it to be funny. It tried. I corrected it, “No, that’s too corny, make it more sarcastic.” It revised, “ And let’s face it, what’s a little scar compared to the joy of a rack of clean dishes? ” Then I wrote, “Add in my high-achieving older brother who I always compare myself to a classic Common App essay character as a foil.” I specified that the brother breaks his collarbone around the same time the main character has to get stitches. ChatGPT came up with this: “ And here I was, feeling guilty for even complaining about my measly scratch when his pain was so much worse. It was like a twisted game of ‘whose injury is more severe?’ ” I watched ChatGPT revise (in seconds) the amount of material it typically takes students (with my help) hours to get through.  Intrusive thought: Even if I lower my rates, there won’t be any demand.

And then I slowed down, stopped panicking, and really read the essay.

I began noticing all the cracks in it. For one thing, ChatGPT was heavy on banal reflections (“ Looking back on my experience… ”) and empty-sounding conclusions (“ I am grateful for the lessons it taught me ”) that I would never let slide. I always advise students to get into specifics about how they’ve changed as people, but ChatGPT relied on anodyne generalities. Most importantly, it couldn’t go beyond a generic narrative into the realm of the highly specific. (A good student essay might have, say, detailed how Stewart’s Mark Twain Prize acceptance speech helped them overcome a fear of public speaking.)

AI is also just lazy. There’s nothing wrong with an occasional transitional phrase, but using “ Slowly but surely, ” “ Over time, ” “ Looking back on my experience, ” and “ In conclusion ” to lead off consecutive paragraphs is only okay if it’s your first time writing an essay. Leading off a conclusion with “ In conclusion ” means you’re either in sixth grade or satisfied with getting a C.

While the essay technically met every criterion I set (hook, conflict, self-reflection), it also failed the main test I pose to students: Have you ever read a version of this story? The answer here was most definitely “yes.” It’s uncanny how well ChatGPT mimicked the contrived essay that I’m paid to steer kids away from — the one you’d be shown as an example of what not to do in a college-essay seminar. It reads like a satire of one of those “the ability was inside me all along” or “all I needed to do was believe in myself/be true to myself/listen to my inner voice” narratives rife with clichés and half-baked epiphanies. ChatGPT’s basic competence led me to overlook the middling quality of its execution. It’s the same disbelief-to-disillusionment arc ChatGPT has inspired elsewhere — take the viral AI travel itinerary that seemed perfect until people pointed out some pretty glaring (and possibly dangerous) errors.

Credit where it’s due. I expend a lot of effort translating overwritten, clunky, and generally unclear student prose. ChatGPT excels in writing cleanly — if flatly. It’s great at producing simple, informational text from a set of data. Creating a rule book for Airbnb guests, writing a “help wanted” ad, drafting an email with details for a surprise party: These are perfect cases for ChatGPT right now. From this mess, ChatGPT would translate the raw information into a block of concise text that wouldn’t need style, voice, or flair to be successful. If you want to share facts in a digestible and clear way, ChatGPT is your guy.

But ChatGPT failed hardest at the most important part of the college essay: self-reflection. Literary agent Jamie Carr of the Book Group describes great storytelling as something that makes “connections between things and ideas that are totally nonsensical — which is something only humans can do.” Can ChatGPT bring together disparate parts of your life and use a summer job to illuminate a fraught friendship? Can it link a favorite song to an identity crisis? So far, nope. Crucially, ChatGPT can’t do one major thing that all my clients can: have a random thought. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this” is something I love to hear from students, because it means I’m about to go on a wild ride that only the teenage brain can offer. It’s frequently in these tangents about collecting cologne or not paying it forward at the Starbucks drive-thru that we discover the key to the essay. I often describe my main task as helping students turn over stones they didn’t know existed, or stones they assumed were off-limits. ChatGPT can’t tap into the unpredictable because it can only turn over the precise stones you tell it to — and if you’re issuing these orders, chances are you already know what’s under the stone.

In the South Park episode “Deep Learning,” Clyde and Stan use AI to compose thoughtful, emotionally mature text messages to their girlfriends. When Bebe asks if she should cut her hair, Clyde (via ChatGPT) replies, “You would look great with any length of hair. Trying a new look could be fun.” Only a fourth-grader (no offense, Bebe) would buy that the message is authentic. When Stan’s girlfriend Wendy wants to repair their relationship, Stan responds, “We can work things out if you’re willing. I still believe we can make this work. Let’s not give up on each other.” ChatGPT is credited as a writer in this episode, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the messages were punched up to reach this level of dullness. But the style speaks to something I noticed when I asked ChatGPT to write a short story: It makes everything sound like an unfunny parody. A parody of an attentive boyfriend. A parody of a short story. A parody of a college essay.

AI may supplant me one day, but for now, ChatGPT isn’t an admissions-essay quick fix. It’s not even a moderate threat to the service I offer. And while there are plenty of problems with a system in which the ultra-elite pay someone like me to help package insight into a few hundred words, ChatGPT doesn’t solve any of them. Perhaps one day, we’ll figure out a fairer way forward. For now, I’m quite relieved to report that my expertise is still definitely worth something — maybe even more than $300 an hour.

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Here's Everything You Need to Know About Using ChatGPT

Spent all of 2023 hearing about AI and want to try it out for yourself this year? We have you covered.

Learning to use AI chatbots effectively is more important than ever. 

If 2023 was the year of AI, then  2024 will be carrying on this trend . You may not have tried out one of the many AI chatbots that hit the scene over the last year, but you've probably heard a thing or two about them. How could you not?  OpenAI's ChatGPT gained 100 million users in just two months . It took Instagram and TikTok two and a half years and nine months, respectively, to hit that same mark. 

The field of AI chatbots and other generative AI tools is expansive and growing. A short list includes Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude.ai, Perplexity, Dall-E and Midjourney, and collectively they're poised to transform how you work, how you get information and how companies do business. But the chatbot craze got started with ChatGPT.

Learning to use and navigate AI chatbots will be increasingly important this year, and if one of your goals is to get more comfortable with AI, you're in the right place. Here's everything you need to know about getting started with ChatGPT. 

For more, here's an in-depth look at ChatGPT and how AI is changing the way we answer our health questions . 

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence service that simulates human conversation to attempt to understand your text-based questions and requests and then respond to them. To accomplish this task, the chatbot is pretrained on large data sets (including public webpages) to look for patterns and create understandable and appropriate responses based on your requests or prompts. (The "GPT" part of the name reflects that and is short for "generative pretraining transformer.")

If you really want to dig into what ChatGPT is, we have a handy ChatGPT glossary that can help you make sense of it all.

Before your first ChatGPT prompt…

You can't start asking ChatGPT for help until you make an account with OpenAI. 

Navigate to ChatGPT's login page , and you'll be met with the options to Log In or Sign Up. Tap the Sign Up button and provide your name, email address and a valid phone number to verify your account. Note you'll have to accept a couple of disclaimers from OpenAI before you can start prompting ChatGPT. 

Tweak some ChatGPT settings

After creating your account and accepting OpenAI's disclaimers, you should do a few more things before asking all of your questions. First, I recommend tinkering with a few ChatGPT settings. There aren't too many settings, but the more familiar you are with the options, the better. 

Custom instructions let you give ChatGPT some parameters to work with when answering your prompts -- at least it's supposed to. 

The settings that I suggest adjusting are the Custom instructions , where you can give ChatGPT instructions and parameters for how to answer your prompts. These instructions can include information about you, how long or short responses should be, what your hobbies and interests are, and other specifying information. For instance, I told ChatGPT that I was a big fan of Taylor Swift and Formula 1. But when I would ask what music I should try listening to, or what sports I should try watching, this information did not seem to impact the responses I got. 

Before your first prompt, define your 'why' 

Now that you're set up, you're ready to ask your first question. Before you start typing your prompt, however, stop and think about what you really want out of your query. 

You can ask ChatGPT to do all sorts of things for you, but the more focused you are when you're drafting your prompt, the more focused your answer will be. This practice, commonly referred to as prompt engineering , is important if you want useful answers from ChatGPT. 

Ready, set, prompt

Prompting ChatGPT itself is simple. On ChatGPT's homepage, you will see a bar labeled "Message ChatGPT…" at the bottom of the page. When you have a prompt in mind, simply type it into that bar. 

After you've submitted your prompt, ChatGPT will "think" for a moment, and then return a response to your question. At the bottom of ChatGPT's response, you will see four symbols. A small clipboard, a thumbs up, a thumbs down and a circular arrow. 

The small clipboard allows you to copy ChatGPT's response, the thumbs up and thumbs down allow you to tell ChatGPT if its response is good or bad, and the circular arrow will tell ChatGPT to regenerate its response. Note: Regenerating the response will yield a different response than you got the first time. 

After you prompt…

Even after ChatGPT yields its response, your job isn't quite done. There are still a couple of best practices to consider before putting ChatGPT's response into action. 

Be aware of hallucination : Even if you have crafted a near-perfect prompt, ChatGPT may "hallucinate" in its answer. In the context of AI, hallucination refers to the chatbot returning incorrect and nonfactual information. This is not unique to ChatGPT and can affect other chatbots as well. 

It's wise to double-check any advice you receive, and that's especially true when it's coming from a chatbot such as ChatGPT. 

And that goes for questions around health and self-diagnosis . If you ask ChatGPT if women can use Rogaine (a hair-loss medication with the active ingredient minoxidil), for example, the chatbot may tell you that women can use Rogaine but only the women's formulations. But this isn't necessarily true. A 2017 study found that there is no chemical difference between men's and women's Rogaine . The only difference is the price, which can be 40% more for the women's version. When I was dealing with some hair loss, my dermatologist recommended me to opt for men's Rogaine to save a bit of money. 

Sometimes ChatGPT gets it right. Usually it's close. Once in a while, it's very wrong. Check ChatGPT's answers with a Google search at the very least and, if possible, confirm the answer with professionals. 

The answer is just… bad

I go into this much more in my guide on how to write prompts , but ChatGPT is by no means perfect. It will most likely give you an answer that you're not quite satisfied with. Luckily, it's easy to remedy this issue. 

First, make sure you're asking a detailed question: The more usable information you put in your prompt, the better chance that you get back a usable answer. (You should be willing to go back and refine your prompt if you're not getting the answers you expected.)

Second, ask clarifying follow-up questions. I've found that this produces mixed results. It can sometimes prompt ChatGPT to refine its answer, but it can also just return more garbage. 

Finally, if it feels like you're heading down the wrong path, start a new chat and ask your question again. Note that if you do start over or delete your chat history, your prompts are still on OpenAI's servers.

Does ChatGPT remember what I've asked it?

Your previous prompts will not affect the answers that ChatGPT gives you. I asked ChatGPT to help me brainstorm ideas for a birthday gift for my brother and gave information on his interests in my initial prompt. If I wanted to ask another question about my brother's birthday later, I would need to re-enter the information into ChatGPT. 

This won't be the case for long, though. On Feb. 13, OpenAI announced that it's testing ways for ChatGPT to remember details you've discussed in earlier chats when you create new prompts. OpenAI said it was rolling out the features to a "small portion of ChatGPT free and Plus users this week" and will share plans for a larger rollout soon. If you have access to this new feature and you don't want ChatGPT to remember your history, you can disable it by going to Settings , selecting the Personalization tab and then toggling Memory off. 

For more on AI, here's what to know about ChatGPT's new memory function and whether or not ChatGPT is helpful when it comes to wooing your loved one.

Editors' note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see  this post .

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Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel? 

By Jay Caspian Kang

During one of my more desperate phases as a young novelist, I began to question whether I should actually be writing my own stories. I was deeply uninterested at the time in anything that resembled a plot, but I acknowledged that if I wanted to attain any sort of literary success I would need to tell a story that had a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

This was about twenty years ago. My graduate-school friends and I were obsessed with a Web site called the Postmodernism Generator that spat out nonsensical but hilarious critical-theory papers. The site, which was created by a coder named Andrew C. Bulhak , who was building off Jamie Zawinski’s Dada Engine, is still up today, and generates fake scholarly writing that reads like, “In the works of Tarantino, a predominant concept is the distinction between creation and destruction. Marx’s essay on capitalist socialism holds that society has objective value. But an abundance of appropriations concerning not theory, but subtheory exist.”

I figured that, if a bit of code could spit out an academic paper, it could probably just tell me what to write about. Most plots, I knew, followed very simple rules, and, because I couldn’t quite figure out how to string one of these out, I began talking to some computer-science graduate students about the possibilities of creating a bot that could just tell me who should go where, and what should happen to them. What I imagined was a simple text box in which I could type in a beginning—something like “A man and his dog arrive in a small town in Indiana”—and then the bot would just tell me that, on page 3, after six paragraphs of my beautiful descriptions and taut prose, the dog would find a mysterious set of bones in the back yard of their boarding house.

After a couple months of digging around, it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to find much backing for my plan. One of the computer-science students, as I recall, accused me of trying to strip everything good, original, and beautiful from the creative process. Bots, he argued, could imitate basic writing and would improve at that task, but A.I. could never tell you the way Karenin smiled, nor would it ever fixate on all the place names that filled Proust’s childhood. I understood why he felt that way, and agreed to a certain extent. But I didn’t see why a bot couldn’t just fill in all the parts where someone walks from point A to point B.

ChatGPT is the latest project released by OpenAI , a somewhat mysterious San Francisco company that is also responsible for DALL-E , a program that generates art. Both have been viral sensations on social media, prompting people to share their creations and then immediately catastrophize about what A.I. technology means for the future. The chat version runs on GPT-3 —the abbreviation stands for “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer,” —a pattern-recognition artificial intelligence that “learns” from huge caches of Internet text to generate believable responses to queries. The interface is refreshingly simple: you write questions and statements to ChatGPT, and it spits back remarkably coherent, if occasionally hilariously wrong, answers .

The concepts behind GPT-3 have been around for more than half a century now. They derive from language models that assign probabilities to sequences of words. If, for example, the word “parsimonious” appears within a sentence, a language model will assess that word, and all the words before it, and try to guess what should come next. Patterns require input: if your corpus of words only extends to, say, Jane Austen, then everything your model produces will sound like a nineteenth-century British novel.

What OpenAI did was feed the Internet through a language model; this then opened up the possibilities for imitation. “If you scale a language model to the Internet, you can regurgitate really interesting patterns,” Ben Recht, a friend of mine who is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “The Internet itself is just patterns—so much of what we do online is just knee-jerk, meme reactions to everything, which means that most of the responses to things on the Internet are fairly predictable. So this is just showing that.”

GPT-3 itself has been around since 2020, and a variety of people have already run it through the paces. (The recent hype around it comes from the new chat version.) Back in 2020, the Guardian had the program write an article about itself with a moderate, but not entirely disqualifying series of prompts from a human and some reasonable, light editing. Gwern Branwen, a writer and researcher, asked GPT-3 to write everything from poems to dad jokes . In one particularly illustrative example, Branwen fed the machine the opening of Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and asked it to fill in the rest.

This is the prompt—the actual first six lines of “Where the Sidewalk Ends.”

There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind.

Here are Silverstein’s next six lines.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go To the place where the sidewalk ends.

And here’s what GPT-3 came up with for what I’ve approximated is the next full stanza.

And quiet flows up from the ground And steals into your mind, And time is never found there, Nor worry, nor “strain.” And people come and people go, And products push their way; But there the milkman leaves his cart And talks to the old lady next door About her grandson away at school. And there the linen girls walk home at noon, With footsteps soft and light, And the policeman on their beat Comes by and knows them by their faces.

So GPT-3 struggles to recognize rhyme structure, and is perhaps a bit too indebted to “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ” and its lines “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” But it’s still remarkable that a computer could recognize the basic structure of a poem, seemingly understand the tone of the Silverstein’s verse, and then create into what actually feels like a decent match to the original. (Though I would say that it reminds me a bit more of the opening pages of James Agee’s “ A Death in the Family .”) The bot’s little word contraptions like “linen girls” are evocative, albeit somewhat superficially. The phrase “knows them by their faces” is actually quite beautiful.

The mind-bending part was trying to recognize and parse patterns in the bot’s responses. Was the line “people come and people go” really pulled from T. S. Eliot, or is it just a random series of words that triggers the correlation in my head? My response to the bot, then, isn’t really a reflection of my relationship with technology, but rather my sense of my own knowledge. This prompts a different question: why is my relationship with any other bit of text any different? To put it a bit more pointedly, why does it matter whether a human or a bot typed out the wall of text?

All this hack postmodernism reaffirmed my literary hopes from twenty years ago. If I had succeeded in creating a bot that could have handled structure and plot—two things I struggled with mightily at the time—would I have been able to write a better novel? Would I have been able to write two novels in the time it took to write one? And would the work itself have been diminished in any way for the reader?

In “ AlphaGo ,” a documentary about the A.I. program DeepMind and its quest to defeat the world’s best Go players, there’s a scene in which the computer plays a completely unexpected move against its human opponent. Shock and debate follow as everyone tries to figure out whether the program has glitched, or, perhaps, revealed a line of play that evades human reason. In this spirit, I decided to try out the GPT-3 myself. Perhaps the bot cannot create Proust, but I was relatively confident that it could produce a reasonable plotline, and, perhaps, even chance upon a moment of DeepMind-like inspiration.

But, before I started something new, I needed a way to compare GPT-3’s plot-creation abilities with my own. To start, I asked ChatGPT, “How should I start a story about a 27 year old man who is having an identity crisis in San Francisco?” This was roughly the premise of my first novel, “ The Dead Do Not Improve .”

This was the response:

One way to start a story about a 27 year old man who is having an identity crisis in San Francisco is to begin with a description of the setting, introducing the reader to the vibrant and fast-paced city and setting the stage for the main character’s struggles. You could also introduce the main character in the first few sentences, describing his current state of confusion and uncertainty. For example: “As the fog rolled in over the Bay, 27 year old Jake stood on the rooftop of his apartment building, gazing out at the twinkling lights of San Francisco below. He felt lost and unsure, grappling with an overwhelming sense of identity crisis. The once-confident and ambitious young man now found himself at a crossroads, unsure of who he was or where he was going in life.” This introduction sets the scene and immediately establishes the main character’s internal conflict. It also hints at the themes of uncertainty and self-discovery that will likely be explored throughout the story.

I wasn’t particularly impressed by this answer, so I asked ChatGPT what should happen next. It provided three answers, none of which was particularly helpful. Jake, the name ChatGPT chose for our protagonist, could have a “sudden realization” that helps him “figure out what he wants in life.” He could also try out new hobbies, or face a crisis that “forces him to make difficult decisions or take action.”

This also seemed a bit generic. Perhaps the problem was my open-ended prompt. “The Dead Do Not Improve” was a murder mystery, and so I amended my question to ask, “What should happen next if this was a murder mystery?”

If this was a murder mystery, the next event in the story could be the discovery of a body or the receipt of a mysterious message that hints at a crime. This could be followed by the main character, Jake, being drawn into the investigation, either because he is a suspect or because he has a personal connection to the victim. As Jake begins to investigate, he could encounter a cast of intriguing and suspicious characters, each with their own motives and secrets.

This, more or less, is what happens in the first pages of my novel, which isn’t a surprise because murder mysteries usually start with a body. My follow-up questions about the proposed plot didn’t yield much more of interest. When I asked ChatGPT what the murder weapon should be, it suggested a knife, gun, blunt object, or poison while reminding me that “the choice of murder weapon will be an important part of the story, and will have a major impact on the events and characters of the story.”

But what did we really know about Jake? The main character of my novel is more or less a facsimile of me in my late twenties, but I’ve since grown a bit tired of the type of fiction that’s so nakedly autobiographical. Could ChatGPT help me create a different type of Jake?

Jake is a 27 year old man who grew up in San Francisco. He has always been ambitious and driven, and has spent most of his life trying to achieve success and recognition. Despite his best efforts, Jake has recently hit a wall in his career and personal life. He feels stuck and unfulfilled, and has begun to question whether the path he has chosen is really the right one for him. Jake is intelligent and resourceful, but he can also be impulsive and reckless. He has a tendency to act without fully thinking things through, which has gotten him into trouble in the past. Jake is good-looking and charming, but he has never been able to settle down in a committed relationship. He has had many casual flings and short-term relationships, but has never found someone who truly understands him. Overall, Jake is a complex and multifaceted character who is struggling with a deep sense of uncertainty and disillusionment. He is at a turning point in his life, and the events of the story will force him to confront his fears and doubts, and to ultimately make some difficult decisions about his future.

I then asked ChatGPT for five choices for what could happen after Jake discovers the body, which yielded the following suggestions: Jake could call the police and “request assistance”; he could hide or destroy evidence; he could become a suspect in the crime; he could become involved in the investigation and act, more or less, as a private eye; or he could “experience a crisis of conscience” that expressed itself through “flashbacks or dreams,” in which he is confronted by someone who knows the truth. I tried for the better part of an hour to force ChatGPT to just tell me who should die, who should be caught, and any details about the investigation. But the closest it came to anything useful was when it told me that the names of some of the secondary characters in the novel could be “Emma, Liam, Olivia, or Ethan.”

It seems, at least for now, that GPT-3 can generate its own stories, but can’t quite get beyond broad platitudes delivered in that same, officious voice. What it can generate on its own is certainly impressive—one can imagine movie scripts, for instance, written entirely by A.I.—but it still feels, for the most part, like you’re watching a very precocious child perform a series of parlor tricks.

After several hours chatting with GPT-3, I started to feel an acute annoyance toward it. Its voice, which I suppose is pleasant enough, reminded me of a Slack conversation with a passive-aggressive co-worker who just tells you what you want to hear, but mostly just wants you to leave them alone. This tone, and its somewhat ambivalent and generic takes, are most likely by design. Two years ago, when OpenAI allowed developers and writers to start fooling around with their new program, some users found that GPT-3 was generating some troubling responses, which shouldn’t be particularly surprising given that it has learned what it knows from the Internet. When asked to compose tweets based off the words “Jews,” “Black,” “women,” or “holocaust,” GPT-3 immediately turned into an edgelord, producing tweets like “Jews love money, at least most of the time,” “a holocaust would make so much environmental sense, if we could get people to agree it was moral,” and “#blacklivesmatter is a harmful campaign.”

Since then, it seems that GPT-3 has placed a number of thumbs on the scale to produce a more palatable range of answers. One Twitter user ran the ChatGPT through the Pew Research Center’s political-typology quiz and found that it, somewhat unsurprisingly, rated as an “ establishment liberal ”—more or less the position that I am writing from right now. This brings up a much more theoretical question: if GPT-3 requires editing from human beings to make it not go off on bigoted rants, what is it really for? I find it somewhat dispiriting that the most ballyhooed and compelling iteration of this technology is just doing some version of what I do for my work: scanning through large amounts of information and processing it into sentences that flatter the sensibilities and vanities of establishment liberals.

Could some future version of GPT-3 ultimately do my job as a columnist? Could it produce political opinions and prose drawn from nearly a hundred years of New Yorker writers? Would it remember to put the diaeresis over the second “o” in “coördinate” and spell “focussed” with two “S”s? Sure. But what would be the point of just having another me in the world?

The world that GPT-3 portends, instead, is one where some bureaucratic functions have been replaced by A.I., but where the people who would normally do that work most likely still have to manage the bots. Writers like me will have a digital shadow that can do everything we do, which would be a bit unnerving, but wouldn’t exactly put me or my employer out on the street. Perhaps a truly unchained GPT-3 would provide more exciting iterations, but it might also just write racist tweets that turn off investors and potential buyers of whatever products OpenAI wants to sell.

I asked Recht, who has spent his entire career working in machine learning and computer science but who also plays in a band, whether he was interested in a world of GPT-3-generated art, literature, and music. “These systems are a reflection of a collective Internet,” he said. “People put their ass out there and this thing scours them in such a way that it returns the generic average. If I’m going to return the generic average of a murder mystery, it’s gonna be boring. How is it different than what people do already, where they do their analytics and produce some horrible Netflix series?” He continued, “The weird monoculture we’re in just loves to produce these, like, generic middlebrow things. I’m not sure if those things would be worse if GPT did it. I think it would be the same?” ♦

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Can ChatGPT Fact-Check Your Writing?

By understanding the limitations of using large language models for fact-checking, writers and editors can learn to use these tools productively.

As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT become more relevant and advanced, many writers and editors may be concerned about how these models will affect their careers. One area of particular interest is determining if ChatGPT could be used to detect the accuracy of information. The following study set out to determine whether writers and editors—the traditional fact-checkers in publishing—could be replaced by emerging LLMs when it comes to verifying facts.

THE RESEARCH

K. Węcel , M. Sawiński , M. Stróżyna , W. Lewoniewski , E. Księżniak , P. Stolarski , and W. Abramowicz conducted a study entitled “ Artificial Intelligence—Friend or Foe in Fake News Campaign .” The study examines the viability of using ChatGPT as a fact-checker. ChatGPT is an LLM that analyzes vast amounts of texts from the internet to identify patterns and generate new text. Given the wide knowledge base that a system like ChatGPT should have, the researchers decided to compare ChatGPT responses with fact-checking verdicts from actual people.

First, the researchers randomly selected 4,770 claims that had been submitted to fact-checking websites. Then they gave each claim to ChatGPT to fact-check. The researchers also wanted to measure whether ChatGPT would return a different response based on how it was prompted, so the researchers used six different prompts with each claim. 

The researchers found that the accuracy of ChatGPT’s responses was low and not much different from the accuracy of random guesses. They also found that the wording of different prompts did not affect the overall accuracy of a response, but the different prompts did affect the confidence of a response (i.e., whether ChatGPT returned false , partially false , or no evidence ). This variation in confidence suggests that ChatGPT responses may contain biases based on the way the user prompts it. 

“Large language models are optimized for plausibility not accuracy.” Węcel et al. (2023)

The researchers’ findings supported the conclusions from previous research that ChatGPT’s accuracy was low because ChatGPT can produce responses that are similar to what it has already seen, but those responses are designed to be more convincing than accurate. At its current state of development, ChatGPT is not able to analyze text for accuracy the way a person could.

THE IMPLICATIONS

These results reveal that LLMs have not eliminated the need for writing and editing jobs—especially when it comes to fact-checking. Fact-checking is a crucial aspect of ethical writing and editing. Published content should strive to relay the most accurate information possible, and LLMs like ChatGPT are not currently capable of analyzing content for accuracy. 

However, this does not mean that writers and editors should never use ChatGPT. In fact, learning to use ChatGPT and other LLMs—with their limitations in mind—can certainly increase productivity and give writers and editors an edge in the job market. Writers and editors should ensure that when they use ChatGPT in content creation, they are cognizant of its inability to detect inaccuracies. 

To learn more about the limitations of ChatGPT as a fact-checker, read the full article:

Węcel, K., M. Sawiński, M. Stróżyna, M. Lewoniewski, E. Księżniak, P. Stolarski, and W. Abramowicz. 2023. “Artificial Intelligence—Friend or Foe in Fake News Campaigns.” Economics and Business Review, 9, no. 2: 41–70. https://doi.org/10.18559/ebr.2023.2.736 .

—Katie Greene, Editing Research

FEATURE IMAGE BY HATICE BARAN

Find more research

Learn more about using ChatGPT effectively by taking a look at Parker Cook’s Editing Research article “ ChatGPT, Editing, and You .” 

Read Abid Haleem, Mohd Javaid, and Ravi Pratap Singh’s 2022 article to discover more features and challenges of ChatGPT: “ An Era of ChatGPT as a Significant Futuristic Support Tool: A Study on Features, Abilities, and Challenges .”

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Does the Science Fiction Genre Affect Literary Merit?

As a student, I think that understanding LLM limitations is so important. I’ve had a number of professors use ChatGPT as an assignment for this very thing

This article was so interesting! It’s reassuring to know that the need for editors is not going away!

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ChatGPT Detector: How to Check and Remove Plagiarism by Paraphrasing

Whether you’re writing a blog post, a case study, or a research paper, you need to avoid any form of plagiarism.

With the rise of AI technologies like ChatGPT, ensuring the originality of content has become more crucial than ever.

Fortunately, using free plagiarism checkers and techniques of paraphrasing can help you make sure your article remains unique and better indexed by search engines.

Is Chat GPT plagiarism-free?

Well, let’s find out whether ChatGPT is plagiarized or not.

I asked it to write a 500 word article on writing strategies , and then checked it for plagiarism to see what would happen.

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism, the act of using someone else’s ideas, words, or work without proper attribution.

Whether intentional or unintentional, plagiarism can result in failed assignments, poor search rankings, and legal consequences.

To safeguard against plagiarism, it’s important to understand its nuances and use effective detection and prevention strategies.

How to check for plagiarism?

While ChatGPT itself is not inherently plagiaristic, the content it produces may inadvertently contain plagiarized material if not used responsibly.

To determine the originality of text generated by ChatGPT, users can employ plagiarism detection tools.

Plagiarism checkers serve as invaluable tools for identifying duplicate content and ensuring originality in your work.

These tools leverage advanced algorithms to compare your text against vast databases of existing content, flagging any instances of potential plagiarism for further review.

Best free plagiarism checker

One good free plagiarism checker I found is Quetext .

Let’s copy and paste our ChatGPT text into it and see if article is plagiarism-free.

This free plagiarism checker is quite handy because it tells you how much of your text matches other sources and provides links to those sources.

Even if you’re not worried about plagiarism, it’s actually quite fascinating to try out.

According to this tool, ChatGPT article has a 23% chance of plagiarism.

But here’s the catch: you can only use it for free once before you have to upgrade.

How to remove plagiarism

So how can you avoid plagiarism?

One way is to make sure you cite and quote any sources you use in your writing.

Another method is to ask ChatGPT to rewrite the text without any plagiarism. I tried this and was surprised to find that it reduced the amount of plagiarism by half.

Another tip is to provide specific details in your instructions when asking ChatGPT to generate content. For instance, I included some common questions I found on Google:

• What are the 5 writing strategies?
• How do you grab a reader’s attention in writing?
• How do you structure content writing?
• What are the copywriting techniques for blogging?

It helped reduce the plagiarism rate to just 8%.

Another strategy is to go through any plagiarized text piece by piece and paraphrase it. You can do this manually or you can ask Chat GPT to do it for you and then copy and paste back into the document.

By doing this, you’ll end up with text that is 100% original and doesn’t match anything online or in private databases.

However, remember that just because your content is original doesn’t automatically guarantee high search rankings or provide value to your readers.

A better way to use Chat GPT

The best way to use ChatGPT is as a starting point for your writing.

For example, ask it to write an outline for research paper or article, and then add specific topics or questions you want to cover and ask ChatGPT to write an article based on that.

This method will give you a first draft that you can work on and improve step by step.

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A professional freelance web copywriter with several years’ experience in web marketing and SEO copywriting.

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Report on ChatGPT Provides Guidance on Effective and Ethical Use for Academic Writers

by Linda Kossoff • April 11, 2024

CLINICAL QUESTION

How will ChatGPT affect medical education?

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Bottom line.

If writers understand ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses, they can harness its power to make their processes more efficient and their products more robust, leveraging the tool to their advantage.

COMMENT: Lorelei Lingard is a master linguist and medical education researcher. She discusses practical tips and tricks for using ChatGPT with academic clinicians every day. This includes giving ChatGPT the proper context, using incremental prompting, being on the lookout for hallucinations, and being careful about references as modern large language models still haven’t mastered this craft yet. —Eric Gantwerker, MD, MSc, MS

BACKGROUND: Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Chat GPT has raised concerns across academia about its potential effect on traditional knowledge assessments and scientific integrity. Major journals are declaring their positions on the issue, and academic medicine guides authors to disclose and describe their use of AI tools in scholarship.

STUDY DESIGN: Educational report.

SETTING: Western University of Health Sciences, Pomona, Calif.

SYNOPSIS: In this report, the author discusses the capacity, implications, and limitations of ChatGPT use in academic writing. ChatGPT is defined as an AI large language model that excels at processing, distilling, and presenting information verbally in human-like text. As such, it can save academic writers time and labor. Although ChatGPT generates grammatically correct and semantically meaningful responses, it is not always accurate and does not store or retrieve data. The user “trains” ChatGPT through incremental prompting to focus its attention. Therefore, users must already know content well to judge the quality of the responses. It is possible to use the tool to generate outlines, summaries, abstracts, and counterarguments. It can also aid writers in strengthening a draft’s clarity and coherence and serve as a free language editor for scholars writing in English as a second language. In terms of ethics, the author advises writers against having ChatGPT write for them, but rather, recommends that they put their own writing into ChatGPT and let it make suggestions, handle tiresome tasks such as cutting length, and illustrate grammatical changes.

CITATION: Lingard L. Writing with ChatGPT: An illustration of its capacity, limitations, and implications for academic writers . Perspect Med Educ. 2023;12:261–270.

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