A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT
OpenAI has published “A Student’s Guide to Writing with ChatGPT”. In this article, I review their advice and offer counterpoints, as a university researcher and teacher. After addressing each of OpenAI’s 12 suggestions, I conclude by mentioning the ethical, cognitive and environmental issues that all students should be aware of before deciding to use or not use ChatGPT. I also answer some of the more critical feedback at the end of the post. (French version: “Guide de l’étudiant pour ne pas écrire avec ChatGPT”.)
“1. Delegate citation grunt work to ChatGPT. AI excels at automating tedious, time-consuming tasks like formatting citations. Just remember to cross-check all source details against original materials for accuracy.”
That last sentence is probably there for legal reasons, because they know they can’t say ChatGPT will produce accurate results. Formatting citations and bibliographies means presenting metadata according to formal style instructions. This is not natural language. ChatGPT will make errors, which will take time to track and correct. Instead, use a reference manager, such as Zotero. It will format things reliably, exactly as expected. Just clean up the references’ metadata as you collect them, and then your bibliographies will never contain mistakes.
