The Future of Academic Article Writing With AI Software
Modern AI has made tremendous leaps forward in the past years. Today there is talk about using AI writers to substitute human scholars in writing academic articles. Still, there is a controversial negotiation among people on both sides of the fence.
Some believe that AI saves a lot of time and thus permits researchers to do more of what they are good at -research. They claim that AI technology can more quickly and easily digest data from the study and save humans the time and stress of producing an article.
On the other side, we have adversaries of the idea who contest the quality of the word processing and especially the abstraction levels and depth that an AI can achieve. They also claim that this will negatively impact the quality of academic papers and, eventually, higher education.
So, is it true that using an AI-powered writing tool developed by custom software development companies would do a great job writing academic articles in the near future?
The potential value of AI technology lies not in substituting human writers but rather as an assistant, collecting ideas that would then need to be thoroughly checked and re-written. This could save some time and offer a decent starting point that is not to be confused with a final result.
AI writers, like all tools, can be used or abused. Therefore, the active choice of implementing them is the most important. According to Forbes, AI content generators will not soon steal white-collar jobs, although they already influence the working process.
1. AI doesn’t think like a human
AI does not think in the same way that people do. It is excellent at pattern recognition but incapable of performing more abstract mental operations and delivering solid, broad perspective judgments on any given topic.
Also worthy of being noted is the fact that a computer processes information in a very logical way. Thus, writing about specific historical events that include descriptions of greed, brutality, war, and other human follies would not be so easy for the AI to render.
2. AI cannot check facts
AI results are only as good as the information that their human operators feed them. Garbage in- garbage out, as it were. If the AI writer scans the internet for its input data, there is no guarantee that it would be able to distinguish between “news” and “fake news.” The fact that many people cannot perform the same operation is proof of the difficulty of this task.
An AI writer would, most likely, have accepted garbage as input and thus give garbage as an output. But unfortunately, this is a risk that cannot be taken by high-level academics these days.
3. AI wording is bland
The wording of AI writers is rather vague and very repetitive. It lacks force and, obviously, love and passion. AI writers likely use templates and fill them in with “whatever word fits.”
This is where the difference between human writing and AI-generated content is most noticeable. An excellent human writer will try to find not just any words but, to the best of their abilities, they will seek to use “exactly the right words.”
4. AI cannot see behind a paywall
Since most avant-garde research papers are published on sites that require a subscription or academic credentials, the AI writer searching the web would not have access to the latest results in the field.
To sum things up
Albert Einstein famously said that you don’t understand a revolutionary idea unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
This is one reason writing papers is so valuable to scholars and the academic system. In learning to communicate their work better, they understand their ideas better. This greater understanding could save decades of research, whereas the AI writer could save days in writing.
Maybe future AI technology will be able to outperform human writing, but I suspect that day is still far away.
Author’s bio: Anastasiia Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, a software development company that builds web & mobile app solutions from scratch. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.