AI rapidly burst into our lives, becoming a useful instrument for various tasks. Of course, there wasn’t much time before students found out how helpful AI can be in their assignments. Professors and teachers laugh a lot reading AI-written essays, where facts are mixed up or even fictional, and the text is very far from human writing.
However, AI has developed, and not all the students use it to create the entire paper for them. Hence, the question appeared: Where is the line at which the use of AI becomes unfair? As with services like www.customwritings.com, it depends on how a student uses help.
Benefits of AI in student writing
Let's agree that the use of AI isn't always about cheating. Sometimes, it’s about advice and support that a student could get from peers or older students but choose AI instead. Help from AI can be used in several ways without concerns about plagiarism or academic dishonesty:
- Improving grammar and style
It’s very unpleasant and can even feel unfair when you work on the paper independently, present your idea, use many credible, solid sources to prove it… and then get a lower grade because of a few mistakes or misprints. There are plenty of online and offline autocorrecting tools. Using them doesn’t break academic integrity in any way. So why can’t a student use AI to get rid of mistakes or misprints that such tools could omit, but AI won’t?
In addition, not all students can cope perfectly with academic style from the very beginning. They have to learn, and it seems nothing bad if AI helps them. It’s especially important that the students see not abstract examples but their own mistakes and how they could be corrected.
- Accessibility for non-native speakers
Some students must combine their education with language learning. Not all students are native speakers, and not all of them have perfect knowledge of the language of their education. In such cases, AI becomes an additional tool that can make their lives easier. It’s not only about writing but also coping with other aspects of tasks and understanding some things that might not be clear precisely because of the difficulties with the language.
- Enhanced creativity and ideation
AI can generate writing prompts or questions that spark new lines of thinking and encourage deeper exploration of a topic. Students can get such prompts or questions from their peers or friends, which isn’t considered cheating. So why must it be the case when the same thing is done by AI?
Brainstorming is one more useful option. AI can quickly generate a wide range of ideas or topics related to a given prompt, helping students overcome writer's block and explore angles they might not have considered.
So, we can see that using AI is not only about creating the entire assignment. It might seem that using AI for ideas might not be totally fair, as well. However, we can do nothing but accept that no essay is entirely original, despite AI and plagiarism checkers' results. Any student can find a similar task on the web and use solutions in it for their own paper. So it’s not a big deal if a sound idea will come from a book, a peer, the web, or AI.
Potential pitfalls
While some ways of using AI are helpful and don’t interfere with academic integrity, others can be much more harmful. By harm, it means not only misleading professors and breaking the rules but also the harm that students do to themselves.
- Risks of AI detection
With the development of AI, different schools, colleges, and other educational institutions understood that they needed to take action to prevent the theft of AI-generated works. They now use AI checkers, and the students who use AI to generate entire papers for them now can be in no less trouble than if they plagiarized their work. Not all checkers are perfect, but the prospect of becoming a dropout because of AI-generated paper has nothing positive.
- Over-reliance on AI
The AI developers added small notes that AI can make mistakes directly on the dialogue page with AI. Any user will prove that AI is extremely useful, but only if you know the topic well enough to understand if AI is mistaken or start making up facts. The students mustn’t blindly rely on AI and need to double-check the information it provides, especially when it’s about specific, highly specialized topics.
- Lack of skills development
Using AI as the only tool for each occasion can make a person lazy. And it’s not only about a lack of desire to do assignments. It’s about a lack of skills in searching, checking information, and considering it critically. These skills are critical for students to develop whatever job they seek in the future. A lack of such skills can become a problem not only for education but for working life as well.
AI's small help can be very useful and make education easier. However, overusing it can cause problems that go beyond educational matters. In fact, it’s easy to draw the line in collaborating with AI. Would you ask for such help from your friends or online without considering it cheating? There is your line.
