I’m a writing professor who sees artificial intelligence as extra of an opportunity for students, rather than a threat.
That units me aside from a few of my colleagues, who worry that AI is accelerating a glut of superficial content, impeding important pondering and hindering inventive expression. They fear that college students are merely utilizing it out of sheer laziness or, worse, to cheat.
Maybe that’s why so many college students are afraid to confess that they use ChatGPT.
In The New Yorker journal, historian D. Graham Burnett recounts asking his undergraduate and graduate college students at Princeton whether or not they’d ever used ChatGPT. Nobody raised their hand.
“It’s not that they’re dishonest,” he writes. “It’s that they’re paralyzed.”
College students appear to have internalized the assumption that utilizing AI for his or her coursework is one way or the other fallacious. But, whether or not my colleagues prefer it or not, most faculty college students are utilizing it.
A February 2025 report from the Higher Education Policy Institute within the U.Ok. discovered that 92% of college college students are utilizing AI in some type. As early as August 2023—a mere 9 months after ChatGPT’s public launch—greater than half of first-year college students at Kennesaw State College, the general public analysis establishment the place I train, reported that they believed that AI is the future of writing.
It’s clear that college students aren’t going to magically cease utilizing AI. So I believe it’s necessary to level out some methods through which AI can really be a great tool that enhances, moderately than hampers, the writing course of.
Serving to with the busywork
A February 2025 OpenAI report on ChatGPT use amongst college-aged customers discovered that greater than one-quarter of their ChatGPT conversations had been education-related.
The report additionally revealed that the highest 5 makes use of for college students had been writing-centered: beginning papers and initiatives (49%); summarizing lengthy texts (48%); brainstorming inventive initiatives (45%); exploring new subjects (44%); and revising writing (44%).
These figures problem the belief that college students use AI merely to cheat or write total papers.
As a substitute, it suggests they’re leveraging AI to unencumber extra time to have interaction in deeper processes and metacognitive behaviors—intentionally organizing concepts, honing arguments and refining type.
If AI permits college students to automate routine cognitive duties—like data retrieval or guaranteeing that verb tenses are constant—it doesn’t imply they’re pondering much less. It means their pondering is altering.
After all, college students can misuse AI in the event that they use the know-how passively, reflexively accepting its outputs and concepts. And overreliance on ChatGPT can erode a scholar’s distinctive voice or type.
Nevertheless, so long as college students learn to use AI deliberately, this shift will be seen as a chance, moderately than a loss,
Clarifying the inventive imaginative and prescient
It has additionally develop into clear that AI, when used responsibly, can increase human creativity.
For instance, science comedy author Sarah Rose Siskind not too long ago gave a talk to Harvard students about her inventive course of. She spoke about how she makes use of ChatGPT to brainstorm joke setups and discover varied comedic eventualities, which permits her to concentrate on crafting punchlines and refining her comedic timing.
Notice how Siskin used AI in ways in which didn’t supplant the human contact. As a substitute of changing her creativity, AI amplified it by offering structured and constant suggestions, giving her extra time to shine her jokes.
One other instance is the Rhetorical Prompting Method, which I developed alongside fellow Kennesaw State College researchers. Designed for college college students and grownup learners, it’s a framework for conversing with an AI chatbot, one which emphasizes the significance of company in guiding AI outputs.
When writers use exact language to immediate, important pondering to replicate, and intentional revision to sculpt inputs and outputs, they direct AI to assist them generate content material that aligns with their imaginative and prescient.
There’s nonetheless a course of
The Rhetorical Prompting Methodology mirrors finest practices in process writing, which inspires writers to revisit, refine and revise their drafts.
When utilizing ChatGPT, although, it’s all about thoughtfully revisiting and revising prompts and outputs.
As an illustration, say a scholar desires to create a compelling PSA for social media to encourage campus composting. She considers her viewers. She prompts ChatGPT to draft a brief, upbeat message in beneath 50 phrases that’s geared to school college students.
Studying the primary output, she notices it lacks urgency. So she revises the immediate to emphasise rapid impression. She additionally provides some extra specifics which can be necessary to her message, akin to the situation of an data session. The ultimate PSA reads:
“Each scrap counts! Be a part of campus composting at this time on the Commons. Your leftovers aren’t trash—they’re tomorrow’s gardens. Assist our college bloom brighter, one compost bin at a time.”
The Rhetorical Prompting Methodology isn’t groundbreaking; it’s riffing on a process that’s been examined within the writing research self-discipline for many years. However I’ve discovered that it really works by directing writers deliberately immediate.
I do know this as a result of we requested customers about their experiences. In an ongoing study, my colleagues and I polled 133 individuals who used the Rhetorical Prompting Methodology for his or her tutorial {and professional} writing:
- 92% reported that it helped them consider writing selections earlier than and through their course of.
- 75% stated that they had been in a position to keep their genuine voice whereas utilizing AI help.
- 89% responded that it helped them suppose critically about their writing.
The info means that learners take their writing significantly. Their responses reveal that they’re pondering fastidiously about their writing kinds and techniques. Whereas this information is preliminary, we proceed to collect responses in numerous programs, disciplines and studying environments.
All of that is to say that, whereas there are divergent factors of view over when and the place it’s applicable to make use of AI, college students are actually utilizing it. And being supplied with a framework can assist them suppose extra deeply about their writing.
AI, then, is not only a software that’s helpful for trivial duties. It may be an asset for creativity. If at this time’s college students—who’re actively utilizing AI to write down, revise and discover concepts—see AI as a writing accomplice, I believe it’s a good suggestion for professors to start out desirous about serving to them be taught the most effective methods to work with it.
Jeanne Beatrix Law is a professor of English at Kennesaw State University.
This text is republished from The Conversation beneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the original article.
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