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Responsible Use of AI Writing Tools: Ethical Practices for Academic Content Creation

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have proven to be of great help to everyone. Students, especially, are using these tools to assist themselves in topic research and essay writing.

However, one crucial thing often gets overlooked when using AI: ethics.

If you are a student and use AI tools for creating academic content, like an essay or thesis, unethical or irresponsible use of the technology can land you in hot water.

And, even if there may not be any repercussions, we should use AI technology responsibly and stay true to ourselves and others.

That said, how exactly can we use AI tools responsibly? This article lists some ethical practices you can follow to ensure a responsible and fair use of AI in your academic life as a student. So, keep reading.

8 Ethical Practices for Academic Content Creation Using AI

1. Check With Your Institute’s Instructions Regarding The Use of AI

Before using an AI tool, make sure your institute allows using it at first.

  • Don’t Use an AI Tool if Your Institute Prohibits It Entirely: Avoid using AI tools altogether if your college or university disallows it, even for the sake of finding ideas or suggestions. This is to avoid violating your institute’s code of conduct.

Remember, your institute can use AI detection tools like Turninit to detect if your paper is AI-written. So, using a tool like ChatGPT or Gemini is always going to be risky, even if you tweak texts manually.

  • Use AI Only As Much As Your Institute Allows: Always comply with your institute’s guidelines regarding AI if they allow using it. For example, you must only use ChatGPT for idea-finding if your institute allows that and not go beyond this.

Complying with your institute’s rules for using AI is the first ethical practice to ensure a responsible and fair use of the technology.

2. Use AI Tools for Idea-Finding

For students who face restrictions when it comes to using AI, idea-finding is one of the best and safest uses of AI tools.

An AI tool like ChatGPT brings together a colossal dataset of written books, articles, journals, magazines, and all sorts of publications, which allows it to scrape thousands of existing ideas and present them at your fingertips.

This ability of AI makes brainstorming ideas easy. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to help you decide the topic for your next essay based on your interests.

Usage of AI in this regard — idea-finding — is like asking a friend or peer for ideas, and is safe to say the least as you’re not using it to skip the main course of homework you’re supposed to handle yourself.

3. Use AI for Suggestions and Critique

Similar to idea-finding, generative AI tools can be used to improve your work through suggestions and constructive criticism.

AI’s ability to inspect text thoroughly at a blazing fast speed makes it a perfect “tool” for finding improvement suggestions and criticism.

The improvement in question can be a minor suggestion, to improve, let’s say the essay’s title, a subheading, or the structure. Or you can use ChatGPT to find flaws in your argument, the transition of ideas, or just the writing style.

These suggestions would be mere helpful insights to help you improve your “finished work” rather than recreating it entirely. It’s like asking a friend or peer to criticize your work, though without their recreational outspokenness.

4. Use AI for Sorting, Formatting, Punctuation, and Similar Helpful Tasks

Speaking of assistance, AI tools have yet another excellent use: to sort, format, and punctuate texts.

Use AI tools for these tasks if your institute doesn’t require them done by yourself, as in the case with students of languages.

Here’s how AI tools can assist you regarding these aspects in academic writing:

  • Sorting: Statistics students particularly can find AI’s this functionality helpful. For example, ChatGPT can extract unsorted data from documents or images and arrange it in a table as per the user’s requirement.

But that’s not it. Students from various fields can have ChatGPT quickly arrange or rearrange their papers’ references.

  • Formatting: ChatGPT can easily format your unformatted academic content into titles, headings, subheadings, and paragraphs. This is especially handy if you have a large paper to format. You can even ask ChatGPT to format the paper according to a specific style guide, such as APA, MLA, or CMOS, whichever is required by your institute.

  • Punctuation: Just like sorting and formatting, punctuation, which is crucial for effective writing, can be done through AI tools, unless you’re supposed to do it yourself as a student of the language, of course.

5. Use AI for Grammar Checking

Students with non-English subjects can use AI grammar checker to ensure flawless writing in their content effortlessly.

For example, our AI grammar checker tool allows you to fix grammar of your text in just three steps: input your text, check grammar, and preserve the output text. The output text will have its grammar fixed in a few seconds.

Grammar checking through AI is favorable to students whose focus is something other than the paper’s grammar. This allows them to save time by minimizing proofreading tasks and better focus on the rest of the assignment.

6. Use AI to Source Research Material

The Internet is filled with research and study material for almost every subject, especially education platforms like university websites and others provide students with valuable material, which can be accessed with ease.

However, sometimes students struggle to find adequate research/study material for their assignment. It could be due to several factors, such as:

  • the topic in question is niche,
  • the topic is newly discovered with little work done on,
  • the search engine’s ranking system has buried search results with un-optimized content below irrelevant content,
  • the student’s way of phrasing their query is unique and unusual when searching for material;
  • the student is confused which or what kind of study materials to find.

These factors can render some materials challenging to find.

In this case, AI tools, ChatGPT or Gemini, can come in handy as they can assess a student’s subject, topic, and research requirements and direct them to otherwise-difficult-to-find study materials on the go — all with the help of a single prompt.

7. Use AI for Better Learning

Generative AI tools truly shine when it comes to learning.

A powerful use of generative AI tools is to let them break down complex concepts into simple-worded, easy-to-understand analogies.

For example, you can ask ChatGPT to “explain general relativity in the easiest way possible,” and ask any questions to further clarify the concept. This is essentially like asking a teacher for clarification, except that the tool can tolerate any amount of questions and preconceptions about the concept or its basics.

Using AI for learning allows students to deepen their understanding of concepts without worrying about asking too many questions or running out of time.

With better understanding of a topic, students can write more clear and effective content.

8. Be Upfront Regarding the Use of AI Tools

Last but not least, students are advised to be upfront about the use of AI tools in their work.

Whether you use an AI tool for ideas, suggestions, proofreading, or learning, it’s essential and only proper that you state it clearly to your professor or institute.

Being upfront regarding AI tools allows us to uphold our academic integrity and not cheat by taking shortcuts.

Understanding The Purpose of AI Technology

Many students and even teachers misunderstand the purpose of AI technology: The purpose of AI technology is to help students enhance their learning, and not use it as a shortcut to get definitive answers to questions, or write entire essays, or automate grammar fixing when you’re supposed to do it yourself, and other scenarios alike.

Thus, students shouldn’t use AI tools to compromise their studies, but rather to enhance their learning and studying experience through fair practices as mentioned in this article.

If students use AI tools responsibly, while staying true to themselves and following their institute’s guidelines regarding AI, they can ensure ethical and fair use of AI tools in many ways, as we mentioned.

Conclusion

In conclusion, students can utilize AI tools as highlighted in the article while staying ethical to their institute’s code of conduct and maintaining their academic integrity.