How ChatGPT can help you write your essay

Artificial intelligence is like a hammer; it has the power to destroy, but it also has the power to create. With the fears of AI taking the wheel for kids’ education rising, it’s important to know how to safely use this technology to your academic advantage. Here’s a guide on how to use ChatGPT to help you write your essay.

In this article, we’re going to go over how to use this tool. However, this isn’t as much a guide telling you how to use ChatGPT to write your essay for you. We’re going to give you some tips and tell you how ChatGPT can help you when crafting your essay. ChatGPT can very easily be your co-pilot to academic success, but YOU still need to be in the pilot’s seat.

A few things before you get started

[Updated February 22nd. 2024] Before you get into writing your A+ essay, there are some things that you need to keep in mind. For starters, at the time of writing this article, the free version of ChatGPT is running on the GPT-3.5 model. Its knowledge stops at January 2022. However, if you’re a paying customer on ChatGPT Plus, then you’re using the GPT-4 Turbo model. This model’s knowledge stops at April 2023. So, if you’re doing an essay on a more recent event, then ChatGPT’s usefulness will be diminished. Make sure that there aren’t any relevant details that came about after these times.

Another thing to note is that there’s a chance that the information you get won’t be 100% correct. AI tends to sometimes give people inaccurate information. There are cases when AI would completely make up information. This is called “AI hallucination”, and it’s a very real issue. As you can imagine, you wouldn’t want inaccurate details in your academic paper. This is why you shouldn’t rely completely on the information generated for you.

Getting started

So, let’s start from the beginning. If you’ve never used ChatGPT before, you’re going to need to make an account. To do this, go to the ChatGPT front page. You can use an email and password if you want, but there’s also the option to use your Google account, Apple account, or Microsoft account to sign up.

ChatGPT is completely free to use, so you don’t need to worry about that. However, if you want an augmented experience with a more advanced language model, early access to new features, and more, then you can become a ChatGPT+ subscriber. It costs $20/month.

After you make your account, you’ll be greeted with the ChatGPT home page with the text field on the bottom to put in your inquiries. If you want a more in-depth tour of how to use ChatGPT, you can check out the link below.

How to use ChatGPT

How ChatGPT can help you write your essay

So, you made your account and you’re looking at ChatGPT, but where do you go from there? Here’s how you can use ChatGPT to help you with your essay.

Get inspiration

So, you know that you need to write an essay, but you don’t know what to make it about. Well, ChatGPT can help you out in that regard. You can ask the chatbot for something to get the gears turning. It’s as simple as asking a question. Example: Give me inspiration for an essay about late romantic composers.

ChatGPT will give you a pretty detailed response when you type that in. If you’re looking for something more succinct, you can be more direct; you can ask for a list of suggestions. Example: Give me a list of late romantic composers to write an essay about.

Making an outline

When you’re getting your draft together, it can be difficult to know what kind of format you want to use. Longer essays could benefit from proper formatting. If you’re having some trouble finding where to start, you can start with an outline. You can ask ChatGPT to make you an outline for the essay. Example: Write me an outline for an essay about Beethoven’s later years.

You’ll want to be specific when you’re typing them in so that ChatGPT knows what information to serve up. Be sure to provide details like who/what the essay is about, the time period, and other relevant details about it. You can talk to ChatGPT as if you’re talking to a human being. When you get your outline, you’ll be able to start making your draft.

Getting a draft

This part of the process gets pretty hairy. Most people tend to jump right to this point and call it a day. They’ll use ChatGPT to generate the whole essay, print it out, and turn it in. As tempting as it is, you’ll want to avoid doing this.

Rather, you’ll be able to use this feature to give you a draft to look at. You can use this draft to get an idea of what you want to write. You’ll be able to look through the details you’d want to keep and the ones you’d want to leave out. It helps to have something in front of you to study if you’re having a block.

Also, if you’re on the fence about what you want to write about, you can have ChatGPT write up drafts for essays on different subjects and topics. It’s a way of previewing how certain essays would look before you write.

Making a summary

So, you’ve finished your masterpiece of academic literature, and you’ve read it through, proofread it, and recited it to your friends. However, you don’t feel like you’ve scrubbed through it 100%. Well, ChatGPT has a mechanic that can come in handy in this case.

ChatGPT has the ability to summarize text that you feed into it. If you paste your essay into the chatbot and ask it to summarize it, you’ll get a brief summary of the content you pasted. ChatGPT will condense what you wrote into a short overview. It’s easy to miss details when you’re reading through a lengthy essay. A quick summary offers a faster look at what you wrote. If there are any inaccurate details in the summary, then there’s a chance that you got something wrong in the actual essay.

A hammer used correctly

There you have it, different ways that ChatGPT can help you write your essay. There’s been a ton of fear surrounding the advent of generative AI, and it’s justified. Tools like ChatGPT give people an easy way to pop out a “well-written” essay in a matter of minutes. This, obviously, has a ton of people worried about the future of education.

However, this is why it’s recommended that you only use this tool as a tool; just one in an arsenal lining your toolbelt. There’s a ton of constructive potential with ChatGPT, and if used correctly, who knows how far it can take you?