So, you have no energy or knowledge for another essay? And you seem to be unable to force yourself to start working on it? A pretty familiar and common situation, right? But what happens next is that some students eventually order an essay online or finish it themselves, while others might be tempted to use an AI tool, an essay generator, or a similar service to complete an assignment. And the last option would be a real mistake. Let’s learn seven reasons why.
1. No Authenticity or Uniqueness
Even if you are not writing an essay for a contest, you should still present an original work with a personal touch and contribution to the topic. Essay generators are in no way capable of doing that, as their main goal is to be able to research and compile information that already exists.
It is especially harmful to use any AI when it comes to opinion essays, critical thinking essays, or other assignments of similar type. An AI can’t have an opinion on any topic and hence can’t write a decent work on topics that require defending your point of view.
Moreover, an essay generator can rarely compile all the facts and arguments found online in a unique and authentic text without repeating itself or other sources. The text usually comes out to be very straightforward and stingy. That’s why the majority of generated essays usually lack any interesting information, thoughts, or perspectives that a text written by a human would surely have.
This lack of authenticity and uniqueness leads to the next reason why using essay generators is a bad idea.
2. Plagiarism and Risk of Detection
Many generated texts would not pass a plagiarism test due to information being taken from open sources in big chunks without rephrasing. While the overall uniqueness of the content and contribution to the field might not bother you much, the plagiarism check definitely should be a real deal for any student.
The majority of colleges check each essay for plagiarism and AI-generated content since many of these online tools have become available to students. You can’t be completely sure which software your college or your professor uses. It might also not be available to you to download and install. Thus, you could not check your text to see whether it would pass the college check.
3. Limited Adaptability
Usually, when you have a prompt that you are working on by yourself, it is understandable what is expected from you. You can adapt the information you found to the prompt and create an essay that matches the task.
An essay generator would not be able to do that. It is hard or even impossible for an AI to understand the context of the prompts or some specific details. Thus, you might get a result that would not be a properly completed assignment.
As it was said earlier, it usually makes no sense to ask an essay generator to write an opinion essay. It might copy someone’s opinion or point of view, but it couldn’t have one of its own. That’s why the amount of work you would have to do additionally to improve the text would be too impressive, considering additional facts and plagiarism checking. Some texts could not be used as they are completely off the prompt but rather contain some information related to the topic.
That’s what we call limited adaptability. Compared to AI, a human can understand the perspectives of the prompt and its depth, thus answering the assignment question in full.
4. Lack of Human Touch and Experience
When a text is generated, a person can almost always detect that. Especially an experienced one like a college professor. There is something missing from the text – a human touch with some little errors, unpolished sentences, or too many emotional phrases.
An essay generator can rarely write like that. But when it comes to real-life cases and personal experience, this is where an AI definitely fails. There is no way a generator would be able to prove its point by relying on a real personal example.
While many college assignments are based strictly on theory, they still require proving arguments with solid proof, including personal experience or known experience. This concept is purely human-like and is not familiar to a generator.
Your assignment task might also require you to elaborate on achievements or challenges in your personal life or people you know to prove your point or add more to the argument you are using. In such a case, an essay generator is not a helper.
A generated essay will also lack your personal tone and style. That will definitely make the essay stand out from the previous ones that you have written yourself. Surely, it all depends on various circumstances, like whether you have a small or big course group, how well your professor knows your work, etc., but it might be obviously not written by you.
5. Inappropriate Tone and Outdated Information
The previous reason leads to this: an essay generator might use the wrong and unfitting tone, style, or even straightforward offensive matters. For example, some terms that were once absolutely normal to use and commonly spread might not be appropriate today. What can also be wrong is the voice used in the work. You would not want your essay to contain confusing word choices or third-person narration.
Outdated research data is also another crucial aspect. You would not want your essay to contain information that was, at some point, proved to be wrong by later studies. That would make the whole work irrelevant to the topic. So, checking all the facts and data would be yet another thing to do after getting a text from an essay generator.
An essay generator would not be able to detect such terms or adapt older information to modern reality and current guidelines. Imagine handing in such an essay. You would surely not want that. So, you would have to edit the text and check various terms to make the text more suitable, which might even take more time than writing an essay yourself from scratch.
6. Unpredictable Quality
You can never know what result you will get with an essay generator. Sometimes, it might provide you with somewhat decent results, while other times, you end up writing an essay yourself as the text is unusable.
Why does that happen? Not every essay generator works in the same way, and it might not always get access to modern databases that are very important in academic writing. Even Chat GPT – one of the most reliable AI services – commonly provides information that is a few years old. While you might not see any problem with that, most fields of knowledge constantly develop and require up-to-date information from the most recent research and studies.
7. Missed Opportunities
When you are writing a work yourself, you have an opportunity to learn something new and memorize facts and details for longer. You also get a chance to engage in self-reflection and self-development. Every written piece is another exercise that allows you to improve your skills, such as academic writing, creative writing, critical thinking, researching skills, etc. That is what you miss when using an essay generator. However, that’s not all.
You also miss an opportunity to get a high grade and improve your academic performance. You would get a mediocre grade at best when using an essay generator, which would not help you with your GPA. These missed opportunities might affect the overall performance and your academic experience as well.
What Should You Do?
Now you know all the reasons why you should not use an essay generator. But what should you do instead? Well, you can write an essay yourself. Considering the fact that you still would have to spend a lot of time editing the text you get from an essay generator, it makes much more sense, even time-wise.
Another option you have is to turn to a writing team like ours. We don’t use AI as we believe that only humans can perceive and write like a human. That’s why our team consists of many experienced writers, editors, and managers to make your experience with us as smooth as possible. If you don’t have the time, knowledge, or even motivation to write an essay yourself, you should have it done by a team of caring people, not by some software. So, be sure that your assignment will be in good hands, and you will receive it perfectly done and tailored to your needs right on time. What is best is that you can set particular guidelines, style, and tone requirements, and we will stick to them – a thing that no AI would be able to do.
So, we hope that you will find this blog post useful. We surely can’t say that using AI for studying has only a negative side. For example, we are sure that you can get a lot of important experience and save a lot of time by using such software. For example, you can ask AI to generate some ideas, find information and sources, analyze data, or make suggestions. But writing longer academic pieces is what only humans should do. We wish you the best of luck with your college assignments.
Karen Palmer
