AI Proofreading – Unless you’ve had your head stuck in the sand for the last few years, you won’t have escaped the arrival of AI. Artificial intelligence is taking over the world – if you believe the Terminator films, perhaps quite literally – with its integration into industries and different sectors occurring at a breathtaking pace.
AI can now be used to write, draw, sharpen images, detect fraud, highlight medical problems, and much more. The possibilities seem endless, but what about proofreading? Artificial intelligence has come a long way in a short period, but are we at the stage of trusting it to check our dissertation or thesis?
Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence will play an enormous role in our future, but how and to what extent remains to be seen. The world of AI is vast, and we don’t have time to cover it all, so let’s focus on writing and proofreading using this new technology.
Chat GPT is currently among the most popular pieces of AI software available freely to almost anyone worldwide. As anybody who has ever used it will know, its capabilities are staggering. Simply ask Chat GPT to write 1000 words about atomic particles, and it will deliver a well-written, highly readable piece of writing in less than a minute.
With proofreading, it’s much the same. Just ask Chat GPT to proofread something for you and add your writing, and hey presto, in no time at all, you have a thoroughly proofread essay that has been checked by one of the smartest pieces of computing humans have ever produced.
Using AI for proofreading rather than doing the work yourself sounds like a no-brainer. Imagine how much time you would save. However, before you get too carried away thinking you’ll never have to proofread a long text ever again, there are a few things you need to know.
The benefits of using AI are fairly obvious. It saves you a considerable amount of time, produces an excellent standard of work, and researches topics in a way and a time that humans couldn’t possibly hope to do. And yet, using it comes at a cost – a big one.
Firstly, using AI to write or proofread your work is strictly prohibited at almost every university in the UK and worldwide. Universities are there to teach you and guide you through a specific topic so that you might appear on the other side with a thesis or dissertation that shows you fully understand what you’ve learned. In exchange, they give you a degree, which has been shown to earn you at least £10,000 a year more than if you didn’t have one.
If you’re not too worried about the rules and use AI to write or proofread your work anyway, there is a significant chance you’ll get caught. You might think that what Chat GPT is giving you is entirely unique, but in fact, it hasn’t reached the stage of producing work that can’t be detected, either manually or using detection software.
Chat GPT tends to overuse specific phrases and sentence constructs. If you know what you’re looking for, it can be pretty easy to tell if a piece is original or has come from the mind of AI.
The second detection level comes from software like Turnitin, which scans texts and can tell you how likely AI wrote it. Turnitin and similar models are now actively used in universities across the UK, with high levels of work currently being rejected for plagiarism. We should also note that this happens for both writing and proofreading. When you ask Chat GPT to proofread something, it will not only check spelling and grammar but may also reorder or rewrite sections to make it sound better – but these changes will come up in Turnitin.
We are hearing more and more about rejected theses and dissertations that were clearly written initially by a human but have been put through Chat GPT to create a strange hybrid style that is easy to pick up on.
Finally, let’s look at the limitations of artificial intelligence itself. AI works by sifting through thousands, if not millions, of words on a topic. This places some severe limitations on what it can and can’t do.
Where AI begins to falter is with higher-level work such as theses or dissertations, which require insight, detailed comprehension, conciseness, and expression that can only come from a human mind. You might think that AI is producing phenomenal work, but actually, it’s creating quite basic writing or proofreading regarding higher education.
AI has been designed to remain neutral as much as possible, which often isn’t what universities are looking for. They want to know that you have an opinion and are able to share it and support it. It usually produces overly wordy texts and lacks the human touch that brings work to life. AI can only use existing information to create new information, meaning there is no originality. People who have spent their whole careers reading essays, theses, or dissertations can spot this from a mile away.
When Chat GPT first arrived, students around the world were licking their lips in anticipation of using it to write and proofread all of their work, but very quickly, we’ve seen that fantasy unravel. While Chat GPT and other forms of AI are superb in many capacities, they are nowhere near the level needed to understand a thesis or dissertation in a way a human can.
Getting caught will leave you tarred with the dreaded tag of ‘plagiarism’, which can lead to reduced marks and even expulsion for repeat offenders. Our advice is to do the hard work yourself, then bring on a professional proofreading service to check spelling, grammar, and flow right at the end before giving it back to you to make the alterations yourself. AI might seem like the magic ticket to a free and easy university life, but thousands have already discovered this certainly isn’t the case.
