AI-generated texts have been a hot-button topic for several months now, and it doesn’t show signs of cooling down, mostly because of the controversy text generation has spawned in academia. Students being students, of course, tried to wriggle out of their assignments by substituting their papers with AI-generated texts. Teachers being teachers, of course, felt insulted because, let’s be honest, who would like to spend their time reading and grading AI’s nonsense. Parents being parents, of course, called for a total ban on this “new tech kids are using for mischief.” Everyone and their mother, being human, of course, panicked and said that ChatGPT portended the end of humankind.
Yet is it really so bad? That is, is AI really so good that we should be afraid? Let’s look into the matter closer.
How Good AI Essay Writer Actually Is?
ChatGPT from Open AI essay writer capabilities blew everyone away. The answers were human-like. They made sense. They were generated in minutes following your instructions. ChatGPT remembered your previous queries and responded to feedback. It wrote school essays. It wrote songs. It wrote code. And its creators made this borderline magical AI essay writer free for everyone! How good can it get?
I’m not going to lie, this advanced AI made simple essay writer like me think about my future prospects and possible career pivoting. Until that is, users discovered AI’s propensity to invent quotes and sources as a part of its “creativity” feature. Magic didn’t happen. For all its natural tone, AI wasn’t really making sense of what it produced.
ChatGPT’s answers were so good we forgot that AI means “artificial intelligence.” We took the last word and ran away with it, leaving behind the “artificial.” ChatGPT is not a “thinking machine.” It’s a sophisticated and complex linguistic model trained on a massive volume of textual data. It was fed so much text it became reasonably good at predicting it and emulating what it had seen before.
You can tweak the algorithm to be a bit more predictable – then, it will produce more factual but bland and repetitive texts. If you tweak it to be more “innovative,” the texts will be more colorful but potentially not true or even grotesque. AI doesn’t understand words, remember? It predicts the probability of a particular word appearing next to a specific set of other words.
ChatGPT hit the Goldilocks zone, where everything was not too much but just right. The texts made sense and were original. However, being AI that doesn’t understand meanings, ChatGPT produced believable emulations of essays – not actually wrote essays. Among the factual information, it sprinkled authoritatively-sounding statements that weren’t accurate: either invented by the AI itself or just parroted from the pieces of datasets fed to it that weren’t true, to begin with. And not only statements – believably-sounding quotes from non-existent books under credible titles. If you are a student, you might not necessarily spot these fall traps. Yet teachers and journalists were quick to catch ChatGPT by the hand, so to speak.
Yet, maybe these are not baked-in flaws but bugs that can be dealt with, and we have more hope with the next generation, GPT-4?
How Does AI Essay Writer GPT-3 Compare to GPT-4?
GPT-4 was trained on immense volumes of data, showing more precision and sophistication as a result. For example, it outperformed ChatGPT by scoring much higher than its predecessor in Uniform Bar Exam and Biology Olympiad thanks to more data, computation, and added image recognition features. OpenAI also states that GPT-4 is 40% more likely to give you factual responses. This is, however, more of a quantitative than qualitative difference. It still invents and does not see the difference between variability and inaccuracy.
Still, all this goodness is not in open access yet. GPT-4 functionality is currently restricted to partnerships with several educational and disability assistant apps. One notable case is the partnership with the Government of Iceland working on Icelandic language preservation and popularization.
The rest of us have an option of joining the API waitlist for developers who want to build applications and services with GPT-4. It seems OpenAI do everything humanly possible to make their creation serve good purposes, despite all the bleak forecasts. The company’s representatives repeatedly stated that they support government regulation of AI use and welcome feedback and ideas.
Great attention was also paid to security matters. OpenAI states on the official page that the new GPT-4 is 82% less likely to return answers to requests for disallowed content. Credit must be given to OpenAI developers and researchers – they have always taken the safety of their technology very seriously. Although AI was developed a few years ago, it was treated with caution. OpenAI restricted the external use of their tools and did not release the source code for the latest AI language model out of concern for potential abuse. They also have a comprehensive content moderation and permissible uses policy.
Can AI Essay Writer Free You from Academic Writing?
Okay, but how do all these improvements affect ChatGPT’s essay-writing abilities? Will AI be able to fake you an essay and free you from writing forever?
A short answer: probably not. There are several possible scenarios of how things might develop from where we are now, but none of it includes students submitting AI-generated essays in droves and clueless teachers giving away As and Bs as if nothing has happened.
First, even the good AI essay writer tool like ChatGPT has limitations. Now ChatGPT reminds you at the beginning of each new dialogue that it may generate incorrect information, produce harmful instructions or biased content, and has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021. So no essays on current topics for you, I’m afraid.
Okay, but what about those stale old topics that have been students’ bane for generations? You know, themes in Macbeth, causes of the Great Depression, the chronology of Ancient Egypt – that sort of assignments? Well, essay writer AI might indeed spell doom for those busy work papers. However, that doesn’t mean that your life as a student will become much easier. Teachers have already been changing the complexity of prompts for assignments they give as homework, shifting focus to critical thinking, argumentative skills, personal opinion, and unexpected perspectives. Uninventive topics from the example above were relics of the pre-information age and had to go anyways.
Even if your teacher is bent on giving you boring topics for writing at home, they still might have ways to make sure you write those yourself. The growing number of AI-generated text detectors gives hope to humanity. They have varying accuracy and might sometime misattribute generated text to a human writer or vice versa. Still, combined with other checkers, they should be enough to give your teacher an idea of the exact amount of original content in your submission.
Yet what if GPT gets really good? Like, what if hypothetical GPT-X arrives that writes better than your professor does and is accurate and unpredictable to algorithms? Wise folks at OpenAI have already thought of that and are rumored to be working on peppering every AI-generated response with unseen signals that will serve as watermarking to make detecting AI-produced texts even easier.
What if that fails as well? After all, pirates have devised ways to crack license-protected games and remove watermarks from copyrighted images. Circumventing AI protection is just a matter of time, persistence, and motivation of the transgressor.
Then, a flipped classroom solution seems the most plausible scenario. Teachers will send students off to study topics independently however they choose – quizzing ChatGPT, browsing specialized literature online, spending hours in the library, or hiring a private tutor. Then, they will welcome them back to the classroom for exams and assessment under strict surveillance or in a low-tech environment, providing only pen and paper.
You see, this game of cat-and-mouse has been going on since the dawn of time. It’s so old that student cribs are the exhibits at multiple history museums. AI essay writers simply add a new exciting page to this never-ending story.
Other Frequent Questions about Essay Writer AI
What is the best AI essay writer?
Text-generating models are only as good as the texts they are trained upon. Jasper and Writer are best for marketing purposes, and Rytr targets self-publishing authors. So technically, the best AI essay writer for you is something you can train on your own texts. That said, ChatGPT performs probably the best for generic essays that do not ask for your opinion or specific examples. However, don’t forget that AI-detecting tools usually have no difficulty identifying AI-generated text, no matter how human-like it might read for you.
Why is AI essay writer free?
Not all AI tools are free – paid services exist too. However, ChatGPT has made a splash exactly because it was so widely available for everyone. The main purpose why these powerful tools become open to the public is simple: crowd-sourcing. AIs trained on immense datasets still need human trainers to give feedback, approve, decline, adjust instructions, etc. This is what millions of people around the world have been doing since the end of 2022 – training the next GPT model. So this is a bit of a quid pro quo more than pro bono.
Can essay writer AI be detected?
Yes, it can. And very efficiently, as a matter of fact. There are about a dozen free tools online open to anyone who cares to check a piece of text: OpenAI’s text classifier, GPTZero, Copyleaks content detector, and Sapling AI detector, to name a few. Moreover, there are subscription services with more sophisticated features that target academic writing and might work with schools and other organizations: for example, Turnitin, Originality, Unfluff, and WordAI.
Is using an AI essay writer considered cheating?
It is for now. At least for the assignments that were supposed to be written without unauthorized assistance. Of course, since AI produces original text, it passes plagiarism detectors. However, plagiarism is more complicated and layered than simply copying and pasting. In case you used AI writing as an experiment, for example, for your modern poetry project, you must disclose it. Of course, this line is constantly blurred by AI-editing tools like Grammarly and Hemingway. It will be interesting to learn how things will develop from here.