Will AI Be Able to Write Essays and Dissertations for Students in the Future?

Artificial intelligence has already proven to be the most promising technology of the last few years, finding its applications in almost every industry. Experts predict the revenue from technologies related to artificial intelligence to grow to $127 billion by 2025. Artificial intelligence is a term used when referring to a number of technologies. One of the fastest-growing technologies is deep learning. It enables machines to learn different models of behavior by analyzing massive datasets.

This way, computers can not only process data to detect patterns in it but also analyze their previous actions and plan the next steps. Machines can do it with no help from programmers, which enables them to learn how to perform different tasks based on their experience. Machines are already capable of performing various repetitive tasks. They send emails, analyze sales, and provide customer support, but can they deal with creative work? Can a machine write an article or a college essay?

How Creative AI Is?

People use AI not only to deal with simple time-consuming tasks. Thanks to AI-driven algorithms, users can get recommendations based on their preferences. Such an approach is used by Netflix, and Spotify. AI can also help marketers analyze social media, detecting the most discussed topics and contextualizing conversations. AI was also used by journalists to create content. For example, The Washington Post used Heliograph, a bot that created more than 850 articles.

However, the success of Heliograph is due to the fact that this robot covered data-driven stories, such as elections and high school football games. It wrote short blurbs, providing important figures. However, if you decide to use a robot to write an essay, the task gets more difficult because it requires the machine to formulate its own opinion. For instance, it will be much easier for a computer to write a book summary than a review because it will be unable to analyze the symbolism in it.

OpenAI also developed an unsupervised neural network capable of writing articles. Unsupervised neural networks don’t need specific training to perform certain tasks. The system developed by OpenAI read over eight million articles from the internet and learned to generate its own content based on short sentences from users. The program creates text step-by-step, analyzing what has been written previously and taking it into account when writing the next sentence. However, sometimes it diverges from the initial topic and its content isn’t coherent enough.

AI and Academic Writing

In the academic area, AI has demonstrated its capabilities thanks to tools like Wolfram|Alpha. It can answer various questions, helping students to cheat in math classes. Grammar checking tools are used by both students and writers to improve their writing. Thanks to AI, such programs can detect not only misspelled words but also more complex mistakes, offering suggestions on word choice depending on the style of the paper and its target audience.

There are also solutions that can create unoriginal texts, rewriting the existing materials on a certain topic. Given that students often don’t have enough time to deal with numerous assignments in high school and college, there’s no surprise that automatic paraphrasing tools become so popular. However, the use of such programs can only create more problems because plagiarism is a very serious issue in the academic world and students who submit rewritten papers can face some serious consequences. The overall quality of such papers is also far from perfect because algorithms still have a hard time writing coherent content that would flow naturally.

“Nevertheless, some companies that offer online writing help for students don’t want to ignore AI, looking for an opportunity to sell more content rather than to impress their customers with high quality.” says Adam Simon, writer at LegitWritingServices — essay writing services review site. “For instance, EssayBot is an AI-driven solution that is aimed to assist students when writing essays on virtually any topic. It creates essays based on a user’s title. It writes the introductory paragraph first and then offers several possible paragraphs so that the user can choose what to write next.” Simply put, EssayBot searches for the necessary keywords on the internet, finds relevant articles, and rewrites the content, creating unique text.

However, such essays still don’t look as good as those written by a real writer. The program writes introductions easily but a 500-word essay needs more than that. The program can provide facts from different sources and even creates references but it cannot connect these facts properly to create something truly meaningful. When writing an essay, you need to keep in mind many factors, being able to stick to the main topic while also providing details about its particular aspects. To deal with such a complex task, a machine needs to not only find the necessary facts but also to understand the general context of the topic, as well as the meaning of each sentence.

AI text generators fail to provide a coherent response to an essay prompt the way a human would do it because they can only write information, without understanding it. When writing, such programs can formulate sentences based on the previous text but they have no idea where the previous idea is going. Therefore, their essays have no clear direction. An essay written by such a program may even contain sentences that contradict each other. Besides, although some of such solutions indeed create unique content by paraphrasing sources, the quality of their paraphrased text is still low. AI simply replaces some words with synonyms while being unable to understand the context. Obviously, such essays won’t get good grades when checked by a college professor.

Wrapping Up

Even though artificial intelligence develops at a rapid pace, it’s still far from replacing human writers. AI-driven solutions that write college essays exist but they still produce papers that contain a lot of meaningless or accidental content. AI already does a great job finding patterns in different types of data but it cannot understand the context. It’s unclear whether or not AI will be able to create coherent academic papers in the future, but as for now, this is a very difficult challenge for developers.