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It is difficult not to be impressed by the recently-released ChatGPT, AI software capable of producing a vast array of documents: essays, stories, itineraries, code, emails… you name it. It has the potential to shake up education in ways we have hitherto not experienced. It is plausible to think that some students have already used the software to write an essay – and some may have got away with it. Below I argue that rather than banning the use of AI essay-writing software, it should become increasingly acceptable – and perhaps even encouraged – for students to use AI to assist in writing their essays.

When my parents were children, in the 1940s and ’50s, pocket calculators weren’t really around, and maths had to be done manually. By the time I was in secondary school in the early ’90s, calculators were a common addition to the maths classroom, and with their help, pupils were doing mathematics which would have been far beyond what our parents could have done with a pen and paper. But the other pupils and I weren’t cheating – we were using technology to help us grapple with more complex material. One still needed to learn the proper ways to use the calculator to obtain the right answer. In short, the pocket calculator changed some of the skills that were necessary in the maths classroom.

When I was a child in the ’80s and ’90s, the internet wasn’t around; if I wanted to find out some information, I had to read a book, or ask somebody who knew. How times have changed! Kids today have the sums of both human information and disinformation in the palms of their hands. Yet we haven’t given up on education. We haven’t said “Kids have access to all knowledge at the touch of a button, so there’s no need for them to learn anything”. Rather, we teach today’s young people how to use the information at their fingertips – how to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources. I believe we should integrate apt use of AI essay-writing software into the plethora of skills with which we aim to equip students.

We should follow a similar trajectory with AI essay-writing software as we did with the pocket calculator and the internet: we teach kids how to use them properly – not to replace human ability, but to augment it. A recent article in The Guardian notes that many students already rely on software to replace words or phrases with more scholarly alternatives, and this is not deemed to be academic misconduct, but if replacing a phrase is acceptable, why not a sentence or paragraph… or more? Numerous pieces of free online paraphrasing software present another way in which students may be tempted to cut corners, and are probably even more likely to go unnoticed by professors.

At the moment, universities consider the use of essay mills or AI essay-writing to be plagiarism. However, these are not equivalents: students submitting work produced by essay mills have had  no part in writing the text: they are not the ostensible author. However, if a student uses AI essay-writing technology appropriately to enable them to write an excellent essay (they edit, improve, and rework the essay which the AI produced) then this would seem to be a worthwhile skill, in the same way that using a calculator to solve complex equations or using the internet to research a topic is laudable.

Given that the technology already exists and its use is (perhaps) undetectable by professors and plagiarism-checking software, there seems little point in banging our fists on the table and saying its use is academic misconduct: for a student who has decided to use such technology, concerns about academic misconduct are simply concerns about not getting caught.

What I suggest is that educational establishments accept that the software exists, and teach students how to use it effectively, because AI still – currently, at least – has its flaws. Spell checkers and auto-correct functions have existed for quite some time, but relying on them blindly can still be problematic. For example, one sees the word ‘defiantly’ in place of ‘definitely’ with alarming regularity; although the word ‘defiantly’ is spelled correctly, users need some background knowledge of word usage in order to make good use of the spell checker. Within this article, several phrases have been underlined to try to tell me that my English usage isn’t ideal, but I am choosing to ignore the suggestions because I think I am right: this too is a skill students need.

AI essay-writing software may still (currently) get the wrong end of the stick at times – OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT have admitted as much, and thorough editing and alteration by a human user may still be required, particularly in the arts and social sciences where an opinion or personal analysis might be required. Of course, if universities accept the use of AI software for essay-writing, they should increase the expected level of scholarship accordingly, in the same way that maths tests for people with calculators should demand a higher level of aptitude than maths tests for people without calculators. But simply behaving as if the technology doesn’t exist, or decreeing that its use amounts to misconduct, is probably not a prudent way forward.