How Good Are the Essays Written by AI That Helped Students Get an 'A'?
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You are a biochemistry student. Your professor assigns a simple homework task: discuss five benefits and drawbacks of biotechnology. Normally, you'd spend two hours completing such a short essay. But then you learn that using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate a submission-ready paper takes only twenty minutes. What do you do? To use or not to use—that is the question.
Reddit user 'innovate_rye' chose to use AI, and the professor gave him an 'A.' He's not alone—others have taken it further, not only using AI to complete their own homework but also earning $100 by writing assignments for classmates.
How good are the essays written by AI?
AI can write short stories. Artist Miao Ying once used GPT-3 to create an animation script: a cockroach falls in love with the AI monitoring it, an AI with the appearance of a movie star who steals the village's energy stone, prompting the cockroach to mine Bitcoin to save it. AI excels at crafting such absurd yet amusing tales. In an interview with Wired, Miao Ying said, 'The part about Bitcoin that I liked was written by the AI, probably because it was trending last year.'
She doesn’t alter the text generated by AI. GPT-3 first produced a short story, which she then broke into sections and fed back into GPT-3 to generate more content. She selected the most coherent parts from each variation to assemble the script.
It’s like making a collage—the AI generates the materials, and humans piece them into a meaningful whole. But if we use AI to write essays, is it really as reliable as rumored?
Following the same process, a The Paper journalist used the AI writing tool Rytr to generate a 1,000-word mini-essay titled What Is Consciousness? Can AI That Creates Art Be Conscious? The structure appears well-organized, divided into five sections: 'What Is Consciousness?', 'Consciousness in Philosophy', 'Consciousness in Science', 'What Is the AI Machine Consciousness We Keep Hearing About?', and 'Can Machines Be Conscious? What Does This Mean for Humanity?'