The entry of China’s DeepSeek into the AI space is going to change a lot of things. Apart from challenging OpenAI’s ChatGPT dominance, everyone now has access to extremely cheap, and possibly free, Artificial Intelligence tools within their reach.
For students and those in the education sector, the question now is: how should you use AI in your academic writing? Should you blatantly ask AI to write your assignment for you at the expense of your thinking faculty?
For the record, major stakeholders in education around the world, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), have recognized that AI has a role in the education sector and is here to stay. This is evident in UNESCO’s guidance for AI use for education policymakers. However, the debate over how it should be used remains crucial to ensure that the tool doesn’t become smarter than its creator.
Can I Ask AI to Handle My Writing Task?
With the invention of writing bots such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, X’s Grok, and DeepSeek, among other AI tools, you can sit back and watch AI do everything with a few prompts.
However, this is akin to allowing AI to make you less intelligent than you ought to be. Handing your writing task over to an AI tool simply means AI is using you. According to social commentator Reno Omokri, “The more you use AI to write, the dumber you get, and the more intelligent AI becomes.”
He argues that allowing AI to handle your writing—whether it’s your assignment, classwork, or homework—means surrendering yourself to AI.
Continuous reliance on AI to handle every task you are given can lead to cerebral atrophy (a condition associated with aging). Because you’ve surrendered to AI, you may find it increasingly difficult to think intelligently. Apart from this, there are some skills that never be handed over to AI to handle.
Ways to Use AI in your Writing
Grammar Checks
Instead of asking AI to write your work, do the writing yourself. Then, you can use AI tools like DeepSeek or others to check for grammatical errors.
Over-reliance on AI for writing can make you intellectually lazy. The most concerning part is that AI rarely admits it doesn’t know something; it often conjures falsehoods or disputable claims simply to satisfy your query.
Some prompts you can use for this task include:
“Check this writing for grammatical errors and fix them without tampering with my style and tone.”
This ensures that AI doesn’t inject its own style and tone, allowing you to maintain your unique voice. Every writer should have their style and unique tone. For instance, Nigeria’s leading novelists Prof Wole Soyinka and Prof. Chinua Achebe have their unique styles that differentiate them.
Clarity Checks
The essence of writing is for your readers and listeners to understand your message. If your write-up is unclear, you can use AI to fine-tune it for better clarity—not by handing over everything to the AI machine, but by using it as a tool to refine your work. You can input your sentence into any effective chatbot and ask it to assess it for clarity.
However, educators should avoid using AI to fact-check claims, as the machine may generate fabricated information and present it as fact.
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