Academized Writer Mary Watson on How to Check if an Essay is Written by AI

The increase of AI (Artificial Intelligence) influence on many areas of life is well-known. Nowadays, it also has a huge impact on education. AI could be a very useful tool for students in their learning process and researchers. However, it also has a negative impact. In particular, AI has caused universities and schools problems with detecting AI-written essays. This phenomenon has become popular among students. To ensure high-quality and authentic content, it's better to use an essay writing service like Academized rather than relying on AI-generated essays. Academized.com provides expert writing and editing that ensures originality and adherence to academic standards. This article will discuss different approaches to how to check if the essay is AI-written. Moreover, it will tell the best solutions which students could use to avoid writing their essays.

 

Understanding AI-Generated Essays

 

Before turning to how we can recognise these essays, consider for a moment what makes them so distinctive. AI essay-production tools draw on sophisticated language models generated by training on massive text corpora. These models are capable of producing coherent, grammatical and typically fluent essays about a wide variety of topics. But the resulting product ‘written’ by these models lacks the depth of thinking, the life experiences, and the nuanced insights that most human writers bring to their essays.

 

Telltale Signs of AI-Written Essays

 

The most obvious indication of an AI production is a lack of stylistic and structural variation: unlike human writers, who might use punctuation marks differently at the ends of sentences or paragraphs, machines relate to different positions in a text in the same way. This can be helpful to an instructor who is familiar with a student’s modus operandi.

 

Generic or overly general claims, a third flag, are another telltale sign. AI models are programmed to produce text based on patterns, probabilities and sequences, which can cause a human-sounding essay to become a broad-strokes generalization rather than a specific, evidence-based argument. A human writer would be more likely to include their personal perspectives, unusual examples and rich explanations based on their individual knowledge of the topic.

 

Longer writing by an AI is also unlikely to meet the gold standard in maintaining an argument. The AI can create flawless paragraphs, but the reader of AI prose can detect that she is not following the argument, or not reading underneath it and through it. The deeper, richer knowledge that humans bring to the page is not merely the ability to write beautiful paragraphs. A human narrative has meaning in addition to the facts of its natural language style.

 

Using AI Detection Tools

 

On the other hand, as AI writing tools have advanced, so too have detection methods. There are quite a few software solutions and digital tools that have been developed specifically to test for AI-written essays. These check for certain characteristics of text, either using machine learning algorithms or natural language processing, to determine whether or not it is AI-authored.

 

Popular tools include GPTZero, Originality.AI and Copyleaks AI Content Detector. Copy the text and paste it into these platforms to see how likely the text is to have been authored by AI. The reality is that these platforms only provide probabilities. They are not guaranteed to be accurate, and can issue false positives or negatives.

 

Human Evaluation and Critical Thinking

 

Even if AI detection tools are abundant, a human evaluation is still an important part of reacting to identified AI-generated essays. In the past, due to their experience, an English teacher, or any writing professional or academic for that matter, already has an intuition for identifying AI-written essays. They notice small differences in its composition that make it different from human writing – something resembling a lack of personality, an absence of critical thinking – that enable them to speculate that the essay before them has been created by an AI.

 

The way forward will require an evaluation of the wider context (what kind of assignment was the student asked to do?) and the context of the student’s previous writing (has the student improved over time, or is this plagiarism gradual, steadily regressing?) And it will sometimes require having conversations with students – probing questions about their sources and their thought process can help to uncover whether or not this is something the student wrote.

Comparison of AI-Generated and Human-Written Essays

Characteristic

AI-Generated Essays

Human-Written Essays

Style

Consistent throughout

May vary based on mood or topic

Personal voice

Limited or generic

Distinct and authentic

Examples

Often broad or generic

Specific and personal

Argument depth

May lack nuance

Can be complex and multifaceted

Creativity

Limited to existing patterns

Can be highly original

Emotional resonance

Often lacking

Can evoke strong emotions

Logical flow

May be disjointed

Typically more coherent

Citations

May be generic or incorrect

Usually accurate and relevant

Contextual understanding

Limited

Can draw on broader knowledge

 

This side-by-side comparison points out some of the ways essay readers – or their teachers – might distinguish between the two. Although these paragraphs show AI advances, human writers still produce material that can be more nuanced, personal or embedded in linguistic context.

 

The Importance of Academic Integrity

 

As more accessible AI writing tools continue to enhance their capabilities, it is essential to continue to underscore the value of honor and academic integrity at all levels of education. The use of AI to create essays not only undermines the learning process, but also deprives students of the chance to learn the critical thinking and writing skills essential for their academic and future professional careers.

 

Institutions and teachers should concentrate on the surrounding culture, and endeavor to create systems and atmospheres that foster original thinking and engage students on a human level, be it by redesigning classes to include personal narratives or in-class writing or oral presentation to complement written work.

 

Alternatives to AI-Generated Essays

 

If your students struggle with essay writing or writing at all, or if they simply don’t have enough time to do it properly, these are alternatives to AI that can be helpful and still maintain academic integrity. They can hire essay-writing services. Often, when students purchase a ready-made essay from such a service, they end up with a good piece of work because they hire them with the whole writing process, from idea-generation to final polish.

 

Writing services can also be a good choice for students who feel especially ambitious or who would like to get better at writing essays. The experience of working with a professional writer will give students valuable insights into how to conduct academic research, build an argument, and write in an academic style. Unlike an essay written by AI software, the essay written by a professional writing service is tailored to the individual student and the requirements of their essay, and is written in the style of the individual student.

 

When you decide to take advantage of an essay writing service, be sure to choose a reliable provider committed to originality and quality. You can find reviews here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-essay-writing-services-review-5-most-reliable-websites-walton-jrq3e. Make sure to opt for the services that allow you to communicate directly with writers, that guarantee a lack of plagiarism, and that offer the chance of revision. Additionally, the majority of reputable services provide useful bonus features, such as writing guides, sample essays, and tutoring sessions to help students perfect their academic performance.

 

Fostering a Culture of Original Thinking

 

Ultimately, the best antidote is to build an educational culture that prizes and rewards original thinking. Teachers can craft assignments that require students to draw on personal experience, conduct primary research or apply creative solutions – things at which AI is a very long way from convincing.

 

Moreover, encouraging discussions about the ethical impacts of AI for essay-writing in the classroom could help students to appreciate the worth of their own original thinking. Making it clear to students that their teachers value their ability to think, interpret, and articulate ideas for themselves – and to do it well – will help students to be proud of their own work and resist the temptation to use AI in their assignments.

 

Conclusion

 

This needs to face the fact that with the further evolution of AI it might become increasingly more difficult to detect an essay written by an AI machine pointing to an educated blend of technological solutions and human experience and critical thinking as the solution that can help preserve the sanctity of academic writing. For students who might need some assistance, the provision of essay writing services is a legitimate option to consider and, whether the final draft is written entirely by the student or co-written with professional assistance, it is one that aims to provide professional support while helping the student develop essential writing skills.

 

The production of a written assignment is not the ultimate goal of this process – the development of individuals who are knowledgeable, thoughtful and articulate in the expression of their own ideas is. By framing the goal in this way, we can ensure that human creativity and independent thought remains at the heart of our academic endeavor, even in the age of AI.

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