Paperpal recently released a generative-AI-powered “Write” feature, which offers text predictions for your existing content. It also enables custom predictions and AI suggestions tailored to your desired output. This makes the feature ideal not only for times you’re in need of inspiration to build upon your work, but also when you are unsure how to articulate an idea in polished academic English.
“Write” has been received enthusiastically by Paperpal users, especially among master’s and PhD student cohorts. The high adoption of generative AI notwithstanding, some academics express concerns about the true value, the potential for misuse in academic writing, and the risk of being caught by AI-detection software. Recently, the obvious and unchecked use of ChatGPT in published research articles has been making the news.¹ In the face of this, it becomes imperative for academics, especially students and early-career researchers, to understand the benefits and limitations of generative AI and adopt an ethical framework (Paperpal’s Do’s and Don’ts) for incorporating these tools in their workflows and maintain academic integrity.
ChatGPT use in published research articles (Source)
Making Sense of Generative AI
AI-generated content refers to the remarkably human-like text responses produced by large language models (LLMs), which are trained on vast amounts of text data written by a multitude of authors. For instance, imagine you’re at a coffee shop. Among the selection of coffee beans, you could opt for a pocket-friendly blend sourced from multiple farms or a pricier but pure “single-origin” bean, sourced from one plantation. In this analogy, if the single origin bean correlates to your unique academic writing style, the AI-generated content is essentially the blend. No wonder that text written by generative AI comes with certain tell-tale signs – the use of flowery vocabulary, the repetition of ideas and factual inaccuracies.²
Despite these limitations and risks to academic integrity, there are superlative benefits to integrating generative AI in the academic writing process—getting over a blank slate and periods of creative slump. The trick is to combine these AI features with your own intelligence to supercharge your critical thinking and come up with your best original writing.
Striking a Balance: Original Academic Writing in the Age of Generative AI
Regardless of your skill levels in terms of English language or academic writing, the best starting point is the assertion that your experiences, contextual understanding, and expertise automatically puts you in superior position over generative AI. Tools like Paperpal are designed to provide precise, real-time writing assistance, not to do the writing for you. Once you adopt this mindset, you can simply “delegate” the writing task, supplying instructions as you would to an assistant. Here’s how to do that.
- Determine what to write: If you don’t already have a topic or the broad theme, generative AI can serve as a great brainstorming partner. This applies whether you’re working toward something simple like a class essay or even if your goal is to write an original research article. For the latter, you may need to supplement much of your own literature curation and reading with AI-assisted analysis to frame your hypothesis. For essays or blogs, the requirement is much simpler. In the screenshot below, see how Paperpal’s Brainstorm feature produced some useful suggestions, with point 5, “Striking a balance” – containing a meaningful angle.
2. Start writing: Once you have decided the theme for your academic writing, take the lead in defining the building blocks or scaffolding of the section, chapter, or article. It’s essential to develop your own base material because only you, not the AI, understands the relevant context, any existing consensus on the topic, and the contribution your article will make. If you’re still hard pressed for ideas or unsure how to structure your work well, prompt the AI to suggest an outline for your essay or research paper using the “Templates” feature in Paperpal.
Paperpal’s suggested outline for this blog article
In the AI-generated article outline, the topics and organization look great at first glance. But upon a critical review, there is room for removing repetitive elements while focusing on key ideas and adding any missing elements. Thus, AI suggestions can jumpstart your own creative thinking, making it easy to incorporate your own contributions. For this blog, here’s what the final scaffolding looked like.
The final article outline based on Paperpal’s AI + human expertise
3. Then, keep writing: Once the scaffolding is in place, it should be fairly simple to fill in the outline, infusing the narrative with both factual and storytelling elements. This is where “Write” really shines, offering context-specific ideas to move the draft forward faster with examples and contrasting elements, making it virtually impossible to break one’s writing momentum.
In Closing
In all the academic writing processes illustrated above, the recurring theme involved using generative AI suggestions at various points to keep the draft moving while simultaneously infusing original ideas and telling the story in a unique conversational style. For authors whose first language isn’t English, reliable generative AI features like Paperpal’s “Write” offers a quick path to hammering out the first draft and building confidence.
Many journals and universities now recognize the role for AI-powered writing and proofreading tools in democratizing English and improving manuscript quality across a diverse scholarly audience. They primarily ask that the use of these AI tools be declared and that authors do not rely blindly on generative AI. By doing this, and meaningfully weaving in one’s own ideas and content using AI as the foundation, authors can maintain academic integrity and put out their best academic writing in half the time.
Looking to speed up your academic writing with AI? Sign up for Paperpal now and give “Write” a try to transform your own article.
References
- Papers and peer reviews with evidence of ChatGPT writing, Retraction Watch. Available online at https://retractionwatch.com/papers-and-peer-reviews-with-evidence-of-chatgpt-writing/
- New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text. OpenAI blog, January 2023. Available online at https://openai.com/index/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/
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