Your unique voice
One misconception about AI is that you can give it a simple prompt and have it generate exactly what you need. In reality, if you ask an AI tool to write a paper for you, you'll most likely get a piece of writing that is ok, but still needs some work. For instance, AI is not very good at providing academic sources, meeting a specific page requirement, or going past the surface of a topic. It's also prone to hallucinate things like statistics and citations, so I don't recommend relying on AI for that either.
However, these limitations don't mean you can't use AI tools to help you. (Unless your professor has specifically banned AI use. In that case then don't use it!) To start, you'll need to understand the role of background research, critical reflection, foreground research, and revision in your writing process. Watch the video below to learn how AI can help you with background research as you start to develop your own ideas on a topic.
Now that you've explored the idea of using AI tools for background research, you'll want to think about how your ideas fit with the ideas that you've learned about from your AI tool. To do this, you'll want to take your background research notes and look for ideas that connect to your own experiences and classroom learning. Sometimes it's easier to do this by stepping away from the computer to develop your own thoughts. What questions does it generate for you? What words are new to you? What would you like to learn more about? This is called critical reflection and helps you identify places where your ideas should be incorporated into your work. In the next section, we'll learn how prompting effectively can help you develop your ideas further.
