The majority of students has faced procrastination at least once during their academic career. Researcher Adela Belin has given ten different psychological reasons why you might procrastinate in her article “Why Do I Write Essays Last Minute: Understanding the Psychology Behind It” (Belin, 2023). One of them regards the uncertainty in how to approach and start writing a university assignment exactly according to the assignment description (Belin, 2023). This can cause an overwhelming feeling especially when the topic is considered to be difficult.
The moments I have faced the feeling of procrastination was most of the time caused by this lack of certainty. I prefer to immediately start off well and not having to rewrite parts of the text since I see that as being inefficient in writing an assignment. However, the amount of knowledge regarding the subject increases with every hour you spend on writing it, which means that what you have already written down can be written more accurately with the new knowledge. So what if you could skip to this part of the essay writing and be able to spend more time on improving an essay instead of spending our time on writing a draft version?
During the Digital Business course in the third year of the Business Administration Bachelor’s degree, we were obliged to use ChatGPT, so I gave ChatGPT the complete assignment description as input. The output given by ChatGPT was very structured and immediately gave me the visualisation of how this assignment could be written to make it all-encompassing. Instead of having to start with a blank sheet, I could now skip to the part where the assignment is qualitatively improved! Through re-reading the complete assignment description and comparing it to the output given by ChatGPT, it became clear which parts of the given assignment needed improvement or what missed completely. By asking ChatGPT for more theoretical and practical evidence examples, I could choose from the given list which ones I would like to implement in the assignment. With a follow-up question, ChatGPT also incorporated the evidence parts I chose from the given list in the text.
ChatGPT had now provided me with a great draft version of the assignment and thus works as a very effective tool to provide inspiration and to visualise the assignment. It is however not just a tool, since the rapid rate wherein ChatGPT is advancing has caused the tool to be evolving into a platform with its Alpha test of incorporating plugins (Goldman, 2023). This development of ChatGPT causes third parties to be incorporated into the platform, which extends the capabilities offered by the platform (Watts, z.d.). Characteristic for a digital platform is creating value for its community (Watts, z.d.). The incorporation of plugins allows the ChatGPT user community to have an increased number of functionalities beyond ChatGPT itself, which increases the value offered (Watts, z.d.)(Goldman, 2023). In fact, these functionalities would have helped me a lot with the usage of ChatGPT to create my assignment.
Now that I considered the output to be a good assignment on its own, I proceeded to make ChatGPT function as an assistant and not as a replacement. ChatGPT as a tool is not capable of adding references to the written text (Welborn, 2023). As explained in the article of Welborn (2023), ChatGPT is made to recognize language patterns and is incapable of effectively analysing all the data it has access to. Asking ChatGPT for references is in my opinion useless since the majority of the output I received was completely made up. What I found to be a useful strategy is using a plagiarism check to find real sources that already overlap with the content in the text as well as get a great visualisation of which parts need explicit modification. I used the given sources by the plagiarism check to rewrite the applicable text parts and to incorporate the in-text citations. The remaining needed sources to substantiate the assignment I researched myself. In conclusion, the development of ChatGPT into a platform could create the opportunity for this plagiarism functionality as a plugin, which in my opinion would add a lot of value.
What are your thoughts on ChatGPT evolving into a platform and incorporating plugins such as a plagiarism check?
Reference list:
Belin, A. (2023). Why do I write essays last minute: Understanding the psychology behind it. writersperhour. https://writersperhour.com/blog/psychology-of-last-minute-essay-writing
Goldman, S. (2023, 23 maart). OpenAI turns ChatGPT into a platform overnight with addition of plugins. VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-turns-chatgpt-into-a-platform-overnight-with-addition-of-plugins/
Watts, S. (z.d.). Digital Platforms: A Brief Introduction. BMC Blogs. https://www.bmc.com/blogs/digital-platforms/
Welborn, A. (2023, 14 maart). ChatGPT and fake citations – Duke University Libraries blogs. Duke University Libraries Blogs. https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/03/09/chatgpt-and-fake-citations/#:~:text=ChatGPT%20is%20based%20on%20a,or%20write%20your%20literature%20review.
This is an interesting take on using ChatGPT for essays. Procrastination is of course not limited to just essays, but other tasks as well. I have personally also had assignments about the use of ChatGTP, but I found that it can often limit your thinking in a certain direction, and it tends to lead you to a very different direction that if you would have written it yourself. I have found it useful in coming up with structures and examples, but I think using it to generate your entire draft is not super productive. You already mentioned that it cannot cite sources, so you cannot be entirely sure that the text is entirely truthful. I think you should also be careful in finding sources through plagiarism. They might talk about the same topic, but not actually support the claims you are making.