Writing in the Age of AI: Best Practices

ChatGPT is a significant advance in AI assisted writing tools that will likely be improved in new versions and by new competitors. However, using AI for writing requires careful consideration of your purpose and audience.

Additionally, you’ll always want to check to make sure that using an AI tool isn’t against the rules. Ask your instructors; in most courses, all content must be written without a chat bot’s help unless the assignment explicitly calls for it. 

However, no matter what the rules are, it is always unethical to present work you did not create as your own. 

How to Use AI Writing Assistance Ethically and Responsibly

• Creating Generic Messages for Generic Audiences. It would be ethical to create routine messages for generic audiences where there is no question of pretending the work is your own. For example, CNN recently reported that real estate agents are using AI to create drafts of property descriptions. However, this will still require careful review and revision before presenting it to an audience.  Like “autocorrect,” chatbots can create errors and inaccuracies.
• As an Assistant. Consider AI suggestions as just that, suggestions, and prompt it for multiple options that you, the writer, analyze. For example, if you are struggling with a paragraph, it would not be unethical to ask an AI tool for three rewrites of that paragraph. Use those rewrites to determine the strategies the bot is using to revise and then create your own revision by applying those strategies.

Be a critical user! AI still struggles, for example, to offer correct grammatical suggestions for complex sentences, and information generated based on the next most likely word is not necessarily accurate information, as the disclaimer on the ChatGPT homepage notes. 

Relying on an AI-produced draft will produce less successful drafts without extensive revisions, additions, fact-checking, and edits. The Washington Post tested ChatGPT to see how it would handle common workplace communication tasks, including emails, memos, team updates, and self-evaluations. They concluded that it “produced responses with errors, factually incorrect information, excess words, plagiarism” and misunderstood prompts, which would lead to miscommunication. It is often more efficient to start from scratch–see below for the many reasons to avoid AI assistance for writing.

• To goof off!  Go ahead and create an Instagram post about a recent vacation in the style of a Taylor Swift ballad.  Just don’t pretend that Taylor guest-authored your post.

Reasons to Avoid AI Writing Tools

Developing Your Own Voice Helps You Build Relationships and Expand Your Network. Professionals use writing to connect to others, build their brand, and network. You need to develop your own voice and create an authentic connection to others.  Tressie McMillan Cottom, author and sociology professor, defined voice in an essay for the New York Times as “that elusive fingerprint of all textual communication” which requires “a relationship between the reader, the world and the writer.”  William Zinsser, in the classic text on non-fiction writing, On Writing Well, concluded that “the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.” AI cannot do this for you.

Drafting and Revising Deepen Your Thinking and Develop Your Ideas. Writing isn’t a static recording of your developed thoughts; writing is part of the process of thinking deeply about a problem, concept, or work of art. According to Peter Elbow, foundational scholar of writing instruction, “writing…is a way to grow and cook a message.” Allowing an AI tool to think for you is outsourcing critical thinking practice and robbing yourself of the opportunity to develop a skill that employers desire.

Using Accurate Information and Credible Sources Matters. AI tools like ChatGPT do not provide many sources even when prompted. They also confidently make incorrect claims. They are built to predict the next most likely word, not to provide vetted, reliable information. For example, Fast Company asked ChatGPT “What was the first TV cartoon?” and it gave a different answer every time the question was repeated, most of them incorrect. Even OpenAI’s CEO tweeted that “it's a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.”

AI Development Can Reinforce Biases. Margaret Mitchell, an AI researcher and entrepreneur interviewed by the New York Times, further noted that AI bots, trained on internet content, reproduce all “the biases and toxic information” their sources contain. If you do not edit AI generated content, you could inadvertently reflect bias and ruin your own reputation at work.

AI Assistance May be Banned in Your Future Workplaces. Copying and pasting client or proprietary data into a third-party AI tool raises serious security risks that companies are only just beginning to address.

Practice Improves Your Writing. Drafting is a key part of writing and a skill that requires practice. As John Warner noted in The Writer’s Practice, “we get better at writing the same way we get better at anything else: by doing it.” Widespread use of calculators didn’t mean that no one had to learn how multiplication and division work. Being a skilled writer yourself is going to make it easier to use AI assistance effectively in the future; as users are discovering, getting the most out of chatbots requires you to write a clear, detailed, and specific prompt.

Communicating a Specific Message to a Specific Audience Requires Extensive Customization. AI-generated messages have a generic tone unless you repeatedly refine your prompting questions and push for greater and greater specificity through careful reviews of multiple drafts.

Writing that is narrowly tailored to your reader will be more effective in communicating your message than a message without personalization. Think of form letters and mail addressed to “current resident.” Many AI produced messages have the same feel and will be equally ineffective at reaching an audience.

Workplace Writing Often Serves as Preparation for Further Discussion. If you outsourced a report to AI and your boss has questions about it, it will be awkward if you can’t answer them because you didn’t write something you presented as your own work. Drafting and revising help you develop a deep understanding of a problem or issue, which will be necessary if you’re asked for additional explanation.

AI Writing Hampers Your Creativity. AI tools mine centuries of human sentences and remix them to provide a response that is likely to be perceived as logical. It is limited by previously generated content used to train it and rarely produces new ideas. As McMillan Cottom explained, AI can’t “chart new horizons or map new experiences. [It produces] carbon copies of an echo of the human experience.” Ian Bogost, in the Atlantic, noted that ChatGPT’s “output” is “consistently uninteresting as prose” because it is “formulaic in structure, style, and content.”

AI-Produced Drafts Can Create More Work for You. To use AI effectively you have to frame and reframe your prompts, evaluate multiple drafts, and then fact-check, rewrite, revise, and edit. In many cases, it is less work to create your own first draft.

AI Writing Assistance Can Equal Cheating. Turning in an AI generated response to an assignment as if you wrote it constitutes a violation of most universities' codes of conduct—it is similar in terms of ethics to having someone else write a paper or take an exam for you.

Plagiarism software and AI detection tools are working to identify AI-written assignments, Bloomberg reported. In addition, instructors are adding AI responses to the pool of documents that our plagiarism software uses to detect issues in student work.