Incorporating AI Tools Into Your Writing Process
Advice to help you evaluate ways to incorporate Artificial Intelligence tools into the writing process.
Before you decide to use Generative AI tools to help with writing an assignment, it is essential to spend some time thinking about where in the process getting support from AI might be both effective and appropriate. This won’t look the same for every assignment and it won’t look the same for every student. This guide will help you think about some of the factors that determine whether or not AI is right for your writing process.
AI and the Writing Process
When we talk about ‘writing’ an assignment, we’re not just talking about one thing. Academic writing often involves multiple kinds of writing that play different roles in generating, developing and communicating your ideas. In general, there are three main ‘phases’ in the process:
Planning
The planning stage might involve using writing to process your reading, generate and develop your own thoughts, and map out your structure. Generative AI might be helpful here as a way to help you make sense of things you have read or help you work through the process of mapping out your structure.
Planning with AI
Working with Generative AI to talk through and clarify your ideas, plan your writing and help you get started.
Editing with AI tools
Guidance to help you work with Artificial Intelligence tools to edit your writing while maintaining academic integrity
Drafting
This is where you start bringing together your ideas and supporting evidence to produce an initial draft of your assignment. This may still be a form of ‘thinking’ writing as often your ideas will develop as you start putting them down on the page. As this is where you generate the content of your essay, it’s best to stay away from AI tools in order to ensure the work is your own.
Editing and proofreading
This is where you refine your writing to ensure it communicates clearly what you need it to. This might involve working on the structure, criticality, and writing style of your work. AI might be helpful here to a limited extent as a tool to check writing style and flag issues with spelling and grammar.
Evaluating AI for your writing process
To get started with evaluating where and how you might incorporate AI tools into your own writing process, it may be worth mapping out the stages in your own writing process – what kinds of writing do you already do to plan, draft, and edit your work? Once you have this, you can begin to reflect on whether AI is appropriate for helping with any of these tasks. Working through the questions below can help you assess this:
What are you being assessed on?
In general, university-level study assesses your higher-order thinking skills. These are your skills in analysing and evaluating knowledge and information to help you come to a decision, take a position on an issue, or design a solution to a problem or task. You can find out more about this in our Critical Thinking page.
What this looks like in practice will differ from assessment to assessment and your assignment brief or module guide will help you to find out what skills and knowledge you are being assessed on. Knowing this can help you judge where it might/might not be appropriate to use AI tools as markers want to see evidence that you have these skills, not the AI.
What is the impact of using AI on your learning and development?
It’s also important to consider what you want to get from your degree. Assignments aren’t just about testing your skills, they’re often opportunities to help you practice and refine those skills. Before you decide where to use AI in the writing process, think about the areas you want to improve in and reflect on whether using AI might take away the chance to develop these skills yourself.
Does this still maintain academic integrity?
Academic integrity involves completing your studies honestly and ethically, having respect for the work of others, and recognising your responsibility to ensure fair assessment. It’s therefore important to ensure your use of AI doesn’t undermine this in any way, either by generating content and ideas for you or falsifying information. You can read more about this in our pages on Artificial Intelligence and Your Learning.
Is AI capable of this task?
Like any tool, AI has certain strengths and limitations and it may not perform every task to the same standard. Therefore, it’s worth staying aware of what these strengths and limitations are to help inform your decisions about if and when AI tools might be appropriate to use in the writing process. Our pages on AI Literacy can help with this.
