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.

> 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.