AI is a tool
I mean. You can use AI to generate a pretty picture, but it’s not gonna teach you how to create a color palette, how to compose a painting, or improve your fine motor skills. You can use AI to generate an essay[1], but it won’t improve your grammar, logic, and rhetoric, your understanding of the topic, and your critical thinking and analytical skills.
AI is a tool, and all tools have its own places. Pushing a tool that’s incompatible to a goal will just set you back.
I had a lot of trouble writing essays before - needed to go and watch fucking tutorials on that shit - but what worked for me was to do an outline (just bullet points) of what I wanted to include in the essay. This generally prevented me from rambling out of topic later on. Then that outline is rearranged so that the topics move smoothly from one another. Using the outline as a guide, I write a first draft. Super casual at first, as if writing a shitpost or a series of messages to a friend. This basically lets me know what I DO know, what I don't, and what other things I should have included that I did not consider when making the outline. I fill in what's missing, double check the facts, then formalize its tone and finally fix the formatting. ↩︎