AI Essay Writer – The future of essay writing?
Introduction
In recent years there has been an explosion in AI writing apps with uses expanding into all areas of modern life. One particular niche that has seen a huge increase in AI usage is education, with AI essay writers now being capable of writing academic essays and assignment on any subject.
What is an AI Essay Writer
The definition of an AI Essay Writer is an application which uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to generatively create essays, assignments and other academic papers using machine learning algorithms. A typical AI essay writer will use one or more text inputs (prompts), to create a written essay which may include tables, lists, headings, in-text references and citations, and other elements common to academic papers.
Key differences exist between the latest generation of AI essay writing applications compared to those available pre-2021. With the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, AI writing transformed from what was previously simple “lookup and copy” methods of creating essays, to new algorithms which can “generate unique content” based on research and data available in ChatGPT’s own extensive data stores, user input, and via integrations with 3rd party suppliers (plugins). We call this new generation of AI writing applications “Generative AI”.
With so many AI essay writer applications to choose from, it can be a dizzying choice to select the right application for you, or to even know if you should be using a generative AI writer at all.
In the next section we cover the basic pro’s and cons of using AI essay writing apps, and consider the potential impacts you might see on your studies. From there we will go on to talk about the 3 best-known AI essay writing tools available right now.
Advantages of Using an AI Essay Writer App
For most students there are a bewildering array of options available, but most AI essay writer apps will offer at least the following advantages:
- Increased speed of writing – AI apps can create generative content within a few minutes, compared to what could be several hours work to write the essay manually.
- AI writers have Broad abilities to research topics and access related material from academic journals and other publications.
- Almost all AI writers have the ability to translate content between multiple languages with relative ease and accuracy
- Using AI to write an essay means that you don’t need to have the knowledge that would normally be required to write the paper yourself.
- AI essay writers can provide proofing and referencing for any work generated, saving yet more time.
Disadvantages of Using an AI Essay Writer
- Your university will almost certainly know that the essay was not written by you.
- Although generative essays can appear well written on first view, it is often the case that research is not up-to-date or complete.
- Choices of sources used for citations may not be relevant to your particular course or level of study – again leading to your lecturer knowing you did not write the essay yourself.
- Although AI has advanced greatly, it still fails to create credible reasoned arguments or reflections, and lacks critical thinking.
- Writing styles from even the best AI writers have patterns that AI detection apps can often recognise.
As you can see above, there are many reasons to consider using an AI writer, but for students and especially students in Higher Education the risks of using AI generated essays are incredibly high. If you are caught handing in a paper that is recognised by your university as being AI generated you risk failing your course, or even expulsion from your academic institution.
Which is the Best AI Essay Writer?
There are currently three main contenders for the best AI writing app:
Each of the AI writers above has the ability to create essays, in varying levels of detail and accuracy.