Will AI Be Able to Write Essays for Students in the Future?

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is becoming a major trend nowadays and is used more daily than the average person realizes. AI was actually created back in 1955 and has evolved massively since then. Today, Artificial Intelligence is found in things like speech-to-text, Siri, Amazon's Alexa, it is used in Cyberdefense apps, robot vacuums, and any of the smart technology out there.

How will Artificial Intelligence affect education and students though? Will AI be able to write essays and papers for students in the near future? For the distant future, absolutely! Anything is possible that far out. How about in the next few years? According to a report done by Cornell University back in 2018, by the year 2026 Artificial Intelligence will be able to write high school level essays, and by the year 2049 a novel that will make the best sellers list.

No data has been given for a college-level essay, but it will obviously come a little later than a high school level if AI brains learn like human brains and at the same speed. One could guess that by 2030 AI could write Bachelor level college essays since the average college takes four years to complete. Students will be happy about it, as they won't need to waffle throughout their essays just to meet the word count anymore. 

The technology used by AI to create this content is called natural language generation which is not only used by news stations but is used in the business world, the medical field, finance and everywhere else you can imagine. As well to create written content from data it is given. AI can take an excel spreadsheet, metadata or any other form of data and turn it into plain language most people can read.

With all this AI Technology out there, and AI writing business reports and news articles, why aren't AI platforms writing students essays right now? It certainly seems as if the technology is available right now to make it happen, but why isn't it being used? With the AI needing to have a template loaded or certain programs run, it is almost a cut and paste type process instead of a from scratch project.

A lot of schools use AI programs to check for plagiarism, so using a template could create issues for a plagiarism checker. I am not sure how plagiarism laws would apply to AI, and perhaps that is another reason AI content creation is not as prevalent. Schools and Universities also want to be able to measure how much a student has learned, not how much a computer has learned. Having AI write an essay will leave no way to measure what a student has learned, except that the student was aware of the topic needed.

There would be benefits to students using Artificial Intelligence for essays. AI can create content in a fraction of the time it would create a student to create the work. AI could also research the topic and ensure citations were correct as well as the facts. There is also the certainty of getting a good grade, and you most certainly would not lose points for formatting. 

Yes, AI will be able to write essays for students in the future based on current technology and abilities available. I think the real question is will AI be able to legally write essays for students. If no school rules or laws are created banning the use of AI, then absolutely. However, if you took the quiz, I gave you the link to earlier you already know it can be pretty hard to tell if a computer has written something or a human. Meaning, if an essay written by AI can pass a plagiarism test, the odds of a teacher or the school knowing AI wrote it and not a student are really low unless you had a failing student who used AI and wrote an absolutely perfect paper. That would raise suspicion.

Although not hinted anywhere yet, I suspect that there will be debates and legislation that will try to be passed regarding the regulation of such technology. If all schoolwork can be done with AI then every student might as well be assigned a doctorate degree the day they are born. Ai will most certainly change our lives in the future and there are both pros and cons to everything created. Artificial Intelligence can and will write essays for students, it will just depend on how far society lets the world of Artificial Intelligence go.