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.

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.