does chatgpt help with essays

Celebrating 150 years of Harvard Summer School. Learn about our history.

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.

Explore Our High School Programs

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.

Sign up to our mailing list to learn more about Harvard Summer School

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.

5 Key Qualities of Students Who Succeed at Harvard Summer School (and in College!)

This guide outlines the kinds of students who thrive at Harvard Summer School and what the programs offer in return.

Harvard Division of Continuing Education

The Division of Continuing Education (DCE) at Harvard University is dedicated to bringing rigorous academics and innovative teaching capabilities to those seeking to improve their lives through education. We make Harvard education accessible to lifelong learners from high school to retirement.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• CAREER COLUMN
• 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.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

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.

Access options

Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals

Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription

24,99 € / 30 days

cancel any time

Subscribe to this journal

Receive 51 print issues and online access

185,98 € per year

only 3,65 € per issue

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

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 .

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

Related Articles

• Machine learning
• Peer review

Why I’m challenging Brazil’s gender norms for my daughter

Spotlight 17 DEC 24

How a biochemistry department used redacted job applications to achieve gender parity

Career News 12 DEC 24

Meet the Latina scientists advancing health and policy

Spotlight 11 DEC 24

Will artificial intelligence help or hinder progress on the SDGs?

Nature Index 11 DEC 24

The AI revolution is running out of data. What can researchers do?

News Feature 11 DEC 24

Large language models can help to translate science into real-world impact

Correspondence 10 DEC 24

Accessibility worsens for blind and low-vision readers of academic PDFs

Career News 11 DEC 24

Banish the PDF-hunting blues with these AI and digital tools

Career Column 04 DEC 24

South Korea can boost the research potential of low-income countries

Nature Index 12 NOV 24

Postdoctoral positions in Virology/Neuroscience

Postdoctoral position on NIH funded research projects to study the biology of virus infection in different cell types & its links to neurodegeneration

Chicago, Illinois

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Postdoc in Genetic Epidemiology/Statistical Genetics

HT is a life science institute studying diseases. The Di Angelantonio-Ieva group seeks a Postdoc to analyze genetics for impactful health research.

Human Technopole

GROUP LEADER in STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY Professor position

GROUP LEADER in STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY Professor position The International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw (IIMCB), Poland invites a...

Warsaw (PL)

International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw

Postdoctoral fellowship in cancer biomarkers research

Postdoctoral fellowship in cancer biomarkers, center for primary health care research, Department of Clinical Sciences Malmö, Sweden.

Malmö (Stad), Skåne (SE)

Lund University

SCUT-GZIC Global Talent Recruitment

Faculty position at SCUT.

Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

Guangzhou International Campus, South China University of Technology

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

February 10, 2023

How ChatGPT Can Improve Education, Not Threaten It

A professor explains why he is allowing students to incorporate ChatGPT into their writing process instead of banning the new technology

By John Villasenor

Jeff Pachoud/Getty Images

To read the news, the sanctity of everything from college application essays to graduate school tests to medical licensing exams is imperiled by easy access to advanced artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that can produce remarkably clear, long-form answers to complex questions. Educators in particular worry about students turning to ChatGPT to help them complete assignments. One proposed solution is to roll back the clock to the 20th century, making students write exam essays using pen and paper, without the use of any Internet-connected electronic devices. The University of California, Los Angeles, where I teach, is considering making it an honor code violation to use ChatGPT for taking an exam or writing a paper.

That’s the wrong approach. This semester, I am telling the students in my class at the UCLA School of Law that they are free to use ChatGPT in their writing assignments. The time when a person had to be a good writer to produce good writing ended in late 2022, and we need to adapt. Rather than banning students from using labor-saving and time-saving AI writing tools, we should teach students to use them ethically and productively.

To remain competitive throughout their careers, students need to learn how to prompt an AI writing tool to elicit worthwhile output and know how to evaluate its quality, accuracy and originality. They need to learn to compose well-organized, coherent essays involving a mix of AI-generated text and traditional writing. As professionals working into the 2060s and beyond, they will need to learn how to engage productively with AI systems, using them to both complement and enhance human creativity with the extraordinary power promised by mid-21st-century AI.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

In addition to the sound pedagogical reasons for treating ChatGPT as an opportunity and not a threat, there are practical ones as well. It simply isn’t feasible to effectively ban access to this technology. Honor code or not, many students will be unable to resist the temptation to seek AI assistance with their writing. And how would an educational institution enforce a ChatGPT ban? While there are tools aimed at detecting text produced by AI, future versions of AI will get better at emulating human writing—including to the point of emulating the style of the particular person who is using it. In the resulting arms race, the AI writing tools will always be one step ahead of the tools to detect AI text.

Enforcement of a ChatGPT ban would also inevitably produce the injustice of false positives and false negatives. Some students who use ChatGPT despite a ban would, through luck or thanks to careful-enough editing of AI-generated text, avoid having their writing flagged as AI-assisted. Worse, some students would be falsely accused of using ChatGPT, triggering enormous stress and potentially leading to punishment for a wrong they did not commit.

And what of the argument that learning to write well provides benefits that go well beyond writing? Writing a good essay from scratch requires careful, often painstaking, thought about organization, flow and communication. Learning to write without AI does indeed promote focused, disciplined thinking. But learning to successfully combine unassisted and AI-assisted writing to create truly good essays also requires these qualities.

Writing is a craft worthy of enormous respect, one which few of us ever master. But most students don’t aspire to become professional writers. Instead, they are preparing for careers where they will write to further goals beyond the production of writing. As we do today, they will write to communicate, explain, convince, memorialize, request and persuade. AI writing tools, when properly used, will help them do those things better.

When I was a middle and high school student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was told that professional success required good “penmanship” and the ability to perform long division by hand. By the time I entered the professional workforce in the late 1980s, technology advances had rendered those skills obsolete. Education culture can be very slow to change, as evidenced by the fact that many schools today still force children to learn long division—a task they will never have to perform anywhere outside of school. With AI writing, educators should stay ahead of the technology curve, as opposed to lagging decades behind it.

The upshot: I am helping my students to prepare for a future in which AI is simply another technology tool as opposed to a novelty. I am also telling them that they are solely and fully responsible for the writing they turn in bearing their name. If it’s factually inaccurate, that’s on them. If it’s badly organized, that’s on them. If it’s stylistically or logically inconsistent, that’s on them. If it’s partially plagiarized, that means that they have committed plagiarism.

In short, I’m encouraging my students to become responsible, aware users of the AI technologies that will play a profoundly important role over the course of their careers. The AI writing, so to speak, is on the wall.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of  Scientific American.

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean?

ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing.

When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers.

ZDNET's editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form .

5 ways ChatGPT can help you write essays

ChatGPT  is capable of doing many different things very well. One of the biggest standout features is its ability to compose all sorts of text within seconds, including lighthearted requests, such as songs, poems, and bedtime stories, and higher-level requirements, like essays. reports, and papers. 

The chatbot's writing abilities are fun to experiment with but can provide tangible assistance with everyday tasks, boosting productivity and cutting time wasted on lower-level tasks. Whether you are a student, a working professional, or just trying to get stuff done, we constantly take time to compose emails, texts, reports, and more. ChatGPT can help you claim some of that time back by helping you brainstorm, outline, and even 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 write an essay for you from scratch (which would be considered plagiarism). A more practical and helpful way to use the chatbot is to have it guide your writing process and improve your text. Think about it as having an editor on command. 

Below, we show you how to use ChatGPT for writing assistance and include other helpful tips. 

How ChatGPT can help you write an essay

If you want to use ChatGPT to support your writing, here are five techniques to explore. 

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

For example,  Copilot , Perplexity , and Gemini also have access to the internet and include footnotes linking back to the source for all their responses, making the chatbots solid alternatives if you'd rather skip out on ChatGPT. 

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

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

1. Use ChatGPT to generate essay ideas

Before writing an essay or report, you need to flesh out what you want to write. Typically when written deliverables of any capacity are assigned, people are given leeway for self-expression and analysis. 

As a result, most writers have the task of finding the angle to approach the report 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: How do AI checkers actually work?

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. 

Within seconds, the chatbot produced a response that provided me with the easy title, options of historical figures on which to focus my article, insight into what information I could include in my paper, and 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 want to include in the essay. To facilitate the writing process, I always create an outline, including all the points I want to touch upon in my essay. However, the outline-writing process is usually tedious as you need to find everything you want to include. 

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

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 Abraham Lincoln through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid."

Also: I've tested a lot of AI tools for work. These are the four I use almost daily to get more done - faster

After a few seconds, the chatbot produced a holistic outline divided into seven sections, with three 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 manually or with more instructions to ChatGPT. 

If you want ChatGPT to include links and sources throughout, you can ask and the tool will regenerate the answer using its web-browsing feature , 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 for your information. If you don't know where to start, you can ask ChatGPT.

All you need to do is ask the AI to find sources for your essay topic. The biggest thing to remember is to include the type of source you want, whether web pages, books, PDFs, research papers, or something else. 

Also:   How to make ChatGPT provide sources and citations

These details are necessary because when you specify web pages, ChatGPT will activate the web-browsing feature and include web links in its article. If you use a very general prompt, however, it will likely default to generating its answer from its database, which isn't up to date. 

For example, I asked the following: 

"Can you help me find web links that I could use as sources for a paper, "Examining the Leadership Style of Abraham Lincoln through Blake and Mouton's Managerial Leadership Grid?"

If you are signed in but have a free account, the chatbot outputs links, accessible right at the top of the answer under the dropdown that says "Searched # of sites". Then, within the response, it will answer your prompt conversationally, including sources with site names and links in parathesis. 

If you are signed in to a ChatGPT Plus account, the chatbot will automatically activate ChatGPT Search. This feature lets users search the web directly within ChatGPT for timely, up-to-date information, complete with citations linked to sources. 

The answers include in-line citations, a "sources" button, which, when clicked, populates a long list of links on the right-hand bar, and, in some cases, a few relevant web links beneath the answer, as seen in the photo below. 

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 plagiarism since it is not your original work. As with any information taken from another source, the text generated by an AI should be identified and credited to the chatbot in your work.

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 create a sample essay to guide your writing. 

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

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

Can you write a five-paragraph essay on the topic, "Examining the Leadership Style of Abraham Lincoln 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 writing. 

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 say is true or accurate. 

As a result, the output you receive might include invented facts, details, or other oddities. The AI-generated text might be a useful starting point for your 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 essay, you can use ChatGPT's advanced writing capabilities to edit the piece. 

You can 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:  How to use ChatGPT to make charts and tables

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 review a specific paragraph or sentence and rewrite or fix the text for clarity. I find this feature very helpful. 

I'm an AI tools expert, and these are the only two I pay for

How chatgpt's data analysis tool yields actionable business insights with no programming, this new ai podcast generator offers 32 languages and dozens of voices - for free.