We encourage students to use all writing and research tools ethically. Doing so requires that students make choices that are supported with academic integrity—meaning that you are still an active participant in your learning and you are representing your capabilities, skills, and knowledge accurately.
That said, AI can be one tool that may aid you in your learning and in developing the writing and communication skills necessary for your degree programs and for your future career(s) if you use it in support of your writing and learning without offloading your critical thinking.
Using AI for writing starts by understanding the importance of how AI works and using what is often referred to as “prompt engineering,” which is basically the instructions you provide to the AI tool, to guide what and how you interact with AI tools. Understanding prompt engineering can help you with improved accuracy, consistency, and creativity generated by the AI tool. Even with good strategies for prompting, it is important to note that AI generators will still have limitations, biases, and information constraints.
Good prompting of AI tools includes the following:
- Establish the context: give details about the situation for your request.
- For example, instead of asking for help creating an outline for an academic paper, you could tell the AI tool more about your specific class, maybe PSY 101, that it uses APA style and citations, that it is a first-year psychology course, and that you are writing a three-page research paper about a topic of interest that is related to psychology.
- Define the task: be specific.
- For example, asking an AI tool to explain how a specific social media platform works will produce vague results.
- Instead, you need to define your goal: Explain how SnapChat has evolved over the last three years and how usage of the platform has shifted during that time.
- Specify the desired outcome: again, be specific.
- For example, asking the AI tool to generate a paragraph of explanation or a list of shifts and details will lead to more specific outcomes (rather than just asking the question without specified outcome).
- There are some options available online for practicing prompt engineering including OpenAI Playground and Google AI Studio. Both of these spaces allow you to test your prompts and get feedback.
- For example, asking an AI tool to explain how a specific social media platform works will produce vague results.
In addition to prompt engineering, there are other effective ways to use AI tools to help support your learning and enhance your understanding of how writing works.
- Role-playing. Using AI to see a topic from multiple perspectives can be a very useful learning tool. You could ask the AI tool to show you how to shift a text you have generated yourself for different audiences.
- For example, you could see how a text may shift with the AI tool for the following:
- Expert in the field
- Academic expert in a parallel field
- Another student
- Editor of a journal
- Reviewer of a proposal
- Tone & Style considerations
- Ask for more formal tone or more academic style
- Ask for different forms of language, such as dialects, or geographical versions
- Ask for translations between languages
- Good for checking grammar
- Tends toward more academic structures
- For example, you could see how a text may shift with the AI tool for the following:
Good general requests from AI tools to help you with your writing:
- Suggest ways to improve the clarity and concision in my writing.
- What haven’t I thought of that I should include for ___ audience?
- Please analyze the logic, flow, and organization of my essay argument. Provide feedback on improving transitions or sequencing.
- Please rephrase overly used words or vague descriptors to enhance clarity and explain why you have chosen those instances and the reasoning for the changes.