A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

Anecdote-- every single high school student and college student I've talked to in the past year (probably dozens) use chatgpt to write their papers.

They don't even know how to write a prompt, or in some cases even what "writing a prompt" means. They just paste the assignment in as a prompt and copy the output.

They then feed that as input to some app that detects chatgpt papers and change the wording until it flows through undetected.

One student told me that, for good measure, she runs it twice and picks and chooses sentences from each-- this apparently is a speedup to beating the ai paper detector. There are probably other arbitrarily-chosen patterns.

I've never heard of any of these students using it in any way other than holistic generation of the end product for an assignment. Most of them seem overconfident that they could write papers of similar quality if they ever tried. But so far, according to all of them, they have not.

The real hack is you give it an example of previous work you have done and ask it to write in that style.

that assumes you actually did some previous work though hah

I've seen my 15 year old use ChatGPT for her homework and I'm ok with most of what she does.

For example she tends to ask it for outlines instead of the whole thing, mostly to beat "white page paralysis" and also because it often provides some aspect she might have overlooked.

She tends to avoid asking for big paragraphs because she doesn't trust it with facts and also dislikes editing out the "annoying" AI style or prompting for style rewrites. But she will feed it phrases from her own writing that get too tangled for simplification.

Also she will vary the balance of AI/own effort according to the nature of the task, her respect for the teacher or subject: Interesting work from a engaging lecturer? Light LLM touch or none. Malicious make-work or readable Lorem Ipsum when the point is the format of the thing instead of the content? AI pap by the tons for you. I find it healthy and mature.

Also anecdotally, I’m a college student and do not use LLMs to generate my papers.

I have however asked ChatGPT to cite sources for specific things, to varying success. Surprisingly, it returns sources that actually exist most of the time now. They often aren’t super helpful though because they either aren’t in my school’s library or are books rather than articles.

> Most of them seem overconfident that they could write papers of similar quality if they ever tried. But so far, according to all of them, they have not.

Ah, the illusion of knowledge..

Coming from an education system where writing lengthy prose and essays is expected for every topic from literature to mathematics, I can confidently say that, after not having actively practiced that form of writing for over a decade, I wouldn't be able to produce a paper of what was considered average-quality back then. It would take time, effort, and a few tries, despite years and years of previous practice. Even more so if the only medium in front of me would be a blank sheet of paper and a pen.

So to confidently claim you can produce something of high quality when you've never really done it before is.. ..misguided.

But in the end, perhaps not really different to the illusion knowledge one gets with google at its fingertips. Pull the plug, and you are left with nothing.

1st year college student here, and an alumni of a certain high school programme I'd rather not mention ever again.

I've used LLMs MULTIPLE times during "academic" work, often for original idea generation. Never for full-on, actual writing.

Think of my usage as treating it as a tool that gives you a stem of an idea that you develop further on your own. It helps me persevere with the worst part of work: having to actually come up with an entire idea on my own.

And AI detection tools are still complete garbage as far as I can tell, a paper abstract I've written in front of one of my professors got flagged as 100% AI generated (while having no access to outside sources).