What Google App Is Best Used For Writing An Essay

[Kum Dana]

Theconsequences for any sort of cheating/misconduct are determined by your institution. Generally, I'd expect more leniency for first offenses and more leniency for things in a "gray area" versus clear violations.

It would seem extremely unfair to me to apply a policy published after your submission, and if you were accused under that policy this seems like a straightforward defense. There is certainly some level of novelty to these tools for everyone involved, and likely to be some growing pains associated with that.

It's possible a strict interpretation would find you have violated some already existing policies, with the new policy only meant to clarify. It could be argued that, especially if you are expected to be graded on things like the language used, you have not submitted work that reflects your own writing abilities. You've also violated any terms of using ChatGPT that require disclosure/attribution.

I don't know what academic system you are in where assignments are graded so long after they are submitted. Possibly you could in the meantime write a proper version of your original script without ChatGPT, confess to having violated a policy before it was a clear policy, and ask that your new submission be accepted. If it were me responsible for assigning a grade, I'd find this to be honest and commendable, but I can't have any idea what the attitude will be at your institution. As BobaFit alludes to in a comment, many people find that ChatGPT's idea of "professional" or good writing really...isn't, so it's also quite possible that the version you've submitted will not get a better grade than what you could have produced yourself, even with your low confidence in your writing.

Earlier in the year, I wrote a policy thought on conversational AI (ChatGPT.

I refer to this as in my view, your use of ChatGPT us what I thought it could be. An assistive tool rather than a replacement tool.

You indicated that you used ChatGPT to polish up your essay. Although you did not say to what degree this polishing up is. What is instructive is that you're not saying you wrote your essay with ChatGPT: in essence, it was not written by ChatGPT from ground up.

Since your essay has not yet been assessed, and the university itself has not detected the use of ChatGPT, I recommend that you approach them and advise your use of this facility for "polishing", let them know that you are worried that this may not be allowable, and ask them if they would prefer for you to resubmit the earlier version of your essay prior to adding this "polish".

If you were the one to make this approach (as opposed to having the university detect it and raise it with you) then that is much less likely to be interpreted as cheating. Moreover, even if your previous submission were to be regarded as a breach of academic rules, if you were to take the initiative to bring this to the attention of the university and offer to resubmit, that would be a heavily mitigating factor. The likely outcome is that your lecturer will counsel you on what is and is not allowed, and will want you to submit the pre-ChatGPT version of your essay.

Assuming you still have your pre-ChatGPT draft, I recommend that you immediately write to your lecturer to disclose the problem and seek a solution. Here is an example of the kind of thing I have in mind:

I am writing in relation to my essay I submitted in February, which I understand is due to be assessed soon. I am writing to disclose that for this essay I constructed an initial draft that I wrote myself, but then I used ChatGPT to polish the prose for the essay, and took substantive changes from this source. The essay presently does not cite ChatGPT as a source.

It has come to my attention that this might not be allowed under university rules, and so I would like to find out (a) if use of ChatGPT for this purpose is allowed; (b) if and how I am supposed to cite ChatGPT as a source; and (c) if not allowed at all, what I should do to go about remedying this error. In case it is not allowable to use ChatGPT for revisions of the essay, I have retained the previous draft of my essay prior to use of ChatGPT and would be happy to submit that version in lieu of the presently submitted version. If use of ChatGPT is allowable with attribution, then I would like to revise my essay to make the required attribution.

Please accept my sincere apologies if I have done the wrong thing here, and for any inconvenience it has caused. I would appreciate if you could advise me on what you would like me to do with my essay in order to make sure it is compliant with university rules.

If we don't know where you study and we don't know the internal regulations, we can't answer this question. Each university deals with this according to its own regulations, so it would probably be best to contact your own study department or someone who understands these regulations and consult them.

From a professional point of view, I would recommend developing your own methodology for recognizing the veracity of chatGPT responses. ChatGPT is not an AI that has logical intelligence, so its answers may be wrong. ChatGPT is a chatbot that synthesizes some text (probabilistically, I guess) from bibliographic sources provided to it during learning. The output is then sorted - the developers assign points to the individual outputs (so, for example, expressive answers are pushed to the back). However, this mechanism cannot check for itself if, for example, there are things that contradict each other in its answer. It is developed to synthesize text, answer, and speak. It can be worse with the truth of the lyrics.

The correctness of the answer also depends on the accuracy of the question. When you ask a question that is not in direct line with the answer (even if it seems like it is), the chatbot will answer it, but in reality, it is not an answer to your question. It is best to play with it a little to see what answers different chatGPT contexts offer to the same question asked in different ways and how the bot answers conflicting questions or situations that occurred after the last update.

I came late to Twitter, creating my account @heerjeet in 2012, long after the cool kids had become veterans. Twitter is a hands-on social media; it takes time to discern its rules of etiquette, and to learn the most effective way to make your point in 140 characters or fewer.

As a result of this online education, I now saw Ford less as a freak show than as a symptom of much deeper problems in Toronto and Canada, a realization that informed articles I would write about him for Toronto Life and the New Republic. Which is why Magary is just plain wrong when he writes:

But writing is a lonely, solitary activity that can breed self-absorption and myopia, especially if your job is to compose strongly defended arguments. While I do hash out my ideas with my editor, this too is an echo chamber of sorts. The Twitter essay is a way of making writing more communal, of bringing more brains into the process and hearing unexpected insights. That real-time feedback informs my evolving thoughts on an issue, making for a more interesting Twitter essay. Sometimes, the result is interesting enough that I turn it into a bona fide essay, which is distributed to a wider audience than my 72,000 followers.

For me, far from being a hectoring form used to explain things to others, the Twitter essay is a democratic form. In this way, Twitter allows us to return to the very roots of the essay as a form. Essay comes from the French essai, meaning a try or an attempt. An essay is not supposed to be a dissertation or a treatise, a definitive statement that sums up a subject for all time. Rather, an essay is a light sketch, a first attempt to think about something, a provisional excursion that makes no claims to finality. In a Twitter essay, the provisional nature of the essay form is enriched by the conversations created by social media.

I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:

My typical week then was probably similar to a week of a History student in 1964: tutorials were generally on Friday, where I would be given the essay question and reading list for the following week:

The actual writing of the essay would take place on the day before delivery, and involve a lot of procrastination (solitaire and minesweeper on my Compaq laptop, as I recall) while the painful process of squeezing the juices from my notes took place.

Those couple of hours would have been reduced significantly for any future essay I might choose to write, as I spent some time figuring out exactly where to get them and installing software to extract the plain text. So I would now allocate an hour to getting the vast majority of texts, as opposed to the small subset of texts I would hunt down over a significantly longer time in the physical libraries 30 years ago.

You can see that the output is mixed in quality (the model I used was relatively small, see Ollama section below), but it did point me at potentially relevant sources for quotes and bits to read. I spent about another hour rooting around these texts and gathering bits of text that I might use later. Note the response time, however (about three minutes is typical). I got a bit frustrated with the response time vs quality and went looking for other tech to use.

Compared to the ChatGPT output, Llama2:70b (with a Llama2 model with 70b parameters) allowed me to automate a significant chunk of the work needed to write the essay, reducing the time needed to write the essay from days to less than a day.

This appreciation of which texts were important, and what I was being invited to write about happened much faster than would have been the case pre-Internet. I really do wonder how students do this today (get in touch if you can tell me!).

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