Is it OK to use AI on your school assignments?

It’s no wonder that AI has been involved with education at all levels, from universities and advanced degrees to the elementary school level. Students are using AI for homework assignments, especially for essay writing.

While this may seem like an efficient way to finish schoolwork, a reliance on AI can hurt a student’s integrity and prevent any actual learning from occurring. It’s important to understand how AI writing works, how to use AI in your homework assignments, and how to avoid serious issues, such as plagiarism and cheating.

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How AI can help with school assignments

AI is especially effective at generating ideas and launching points for essays, art classes, and assignments. By making a list of keywords and context for an assignment, then entering them into generative AI, students can brainstorm ideas and areas of research to focus on.

For example, if you’re writing a book report, you can use AI to suggest thematic elements that are crucial to the story. And by placing a classic work in its historical context, AI can summarize important topics of research that you can incorporate in your work.

Students can also use AI to understand the nuances of grammar and sentence structure, especially those whose native language isn’t English.

When is AI considered a step too far?

When students rely entirely on AI to complete their school assignments, they are effectively cheating in their classes as well as cheating themselves. Students may fail to learn the material, which can impact future lessons and exams, as well as placement in advanced classes in the years to come.

And by not learning on their own, they might be lost when it comes time to applying these lessons in the real world. By not understanding the essentials of writing, for example, students might struggle during internships or fall short of their career goals at a critical stage of their post-graduate lives.

AI can also be prone to make obvious or glaring errors in its output. Since generative AI is still in its nascent stages of development, it can misinterpret a prompt, offer incorrect or outdated information, or fail to meet up to standards of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness—three elements that are critical for academic writing.

Finally, by learning the ins and outs of essay writing, students develop rhetorical strategies, argumentative and persuasive skills, and critical thinking—all while developing their own unique voice.

How using AI can backfire

Like any useful tool, misusing it can cause more problems than it solves. Here are some ways that AI can hurt instead of help students:

• Plagiarism. This is a violation of integrity that can cause a student to fail an assignment in an academic setting, disrupting the trust between the educator and the student. In a real-world context, journalists who have been found plagiarizing stories have faced consequences such as job loss and reputational hits.
• AI detection. Tools have been created to detect when text has been generated by AI. Since generative AI operates by paraphrasing real-world text, AI detectors can notice patterns in text and alert a user to copyright infringement or cyber compliance. Teachers will likely frown on assignments written with large amounts of AI input.
• Red flags. Experienced teachers can detect signs of AI generation in assignments. According to some educators, some tip-offs to AI-generated content might include perfect grammar, bland writing style, and failing to respond to the actual writing prompt. Essays that markedly improve in such a short time might be seen as suspicious.

Ultimately, AI is a tool best used for generating ideas instead of being used to complete entire assignments. Learn more about how to get the most out of AI technology with other life hacks,and explore tips for getting the most out of your writing.