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Nowadays, many different GenAI applications can assist students in writing tasks. Assisting can be just brainstorming about ideas or helping structuring an essay, but it can also be writing the full length essay with minimum to no student intervention. The latter is probably not the smartest choice as probably every school institution has GenAI policies, usually prohibiting to present the AI’s work as your own product. That’s why I was surprised while reading the course manual of Digital Business, (part of the RSM’s BA program) last academic year. I needed to write two essays about digital topics, of which the first essay had to be co-written with a GenAI tool. I chose my familiar friend, ChatGPT, to assist me in taking on this challenge. Indeed, it became more of a challenge than I initially expected it to be.

A promising start

Every topic that the essay had to include was summarized in the assignment description. The mandatory first step was to copy/paste the description and use it as the first prompt for the GenAI application. At first glance, ChatGPT answered the prompt with already a quite impressive essay. But some things were not sufficient according to the essay description and my own preferences. The essay was way too long, did not include sources and it had more a kind of question-answer format. After this, I asked ChatGPT for more theory and explanations in order to develop my own desired theories that I wanted to include in the answer. This learning process was really nice as the interaction with the AI was on a deeper level: understanding core concepts.

Shift in focus

Eventually, I prompted my own desired answer with bullet points and let my companion write the full length essay. Here is where my focus shifted from understanding theory to more superficial tasks such as finding sources, citing, essay structure and much more. Finding sources and citations has caused me the highest levels of frustration, due to my wrong expectations of ChatGPT’s capabilities.

Problems, problems and more problems.

Initially, I thought that finding references with Chat was a piece of cake (so naïve, I know). During the article search process, I was already experiencing difficulties as many articles did not fully connect to the theories. After finally finding a suitable article, I came to the conclusion that ChatGPT has another very nice treat (not). When asking for citations from the article, ChatGPT liked to generate fictional citations that suited my text in the best way possible. Really sweet of my companion, but a bit illegal.

As I was dedicating so much time and prompts to article search and correcting the model if it was wrong again, the system started to slow down. With every input from my side, the lag increased. At the end, I had to wait minutes for the answer to finally show up.

Little did I know what kind of surprise I would receive at the end, just before handing in the essay. When reading the reference list one more time, I saw really weird looking website links. Immediately, I got a very bad feeling which was confirmed shortly after searching the internet: some articles did not even exist.

Lessons Learned

Luckily, I had some time (about two hours) left to erase the AI-generated articles and search for new existing articles. The latter turned out to be impossible given the time frame, so I had to rewrite or erase text in order to present it as my own work. Fortunately, I submitted the assignment in time and received a good grade for it

But the most important thing I received was a better understanding of ChatGPT’s capabilities and limitations. I actually overestimated its capabilities and faced the consequences of it. I spent way to much time on superficial interaction and the correction of the GenAI application, which was clearly visible in the interaction document I had to submit along with the final essay. The interaction document was basically a copy/paste of the entire interaction with the GenAI model. The length of my document was 140+ pages!

For the second essay, I tried a different approach because of this experience. Before prompting anything, I did my own research and searched for articles myself. I did use ChatGPT for understanding theory and later on for formatting, spelling and grammar correction. Remarkably, I received a lower grade for this essay but I did not really care as I saved much time. I had significantly reduced the number of interaction pages, thereby also reducing my frustrations and headaches.

5/5 (1)

Over the last two decades platforms have become extremely popular where people from all over the world are able to connect and share all kinds of content. The rise of social media was also accompanied by individuals who saw the potential in sharing content, and started to focus on becoming a prominent content creator. In the most recent years, the introduction of genAI has affected the field of content creation on social media. This raises the question whether genAI does more good or causes more harm. For both sides something can be said.

GenAI is constantly improving in its creative capabilities including text, image, video’s and many other creations. Combined with the open accessibility of genAI applications, users from all backgrounds can now participate in creative processes without the need to possess creative expertise (Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2025). Where social media was a field of creative uniqueness 10 years ago, genAI has removed some of the creative barriers that were blocking other users from being content producers. User’s that previously were only receivers of information are being encouraged by AI to be more active. GenAI has countless different applications that can be used to assist non-experienced social media users with delivering posts. ChatGPT can be used for idea generation, images can be generated by Midjourney (Shepherd, 2024) and other applications can even generate entire artificial video’s based on an user’s prompt.  

Furthermore, GenAI has the characteristic to be very quick with its content generation allowing for frequent posts. But more posts are not always beneficial for a social media platform as they do not guarantee more quality. This can be because of unoriginality that emerges from users focusing to much on quantity instead of the quality of the content. Additionally, the increased accessibility of genAI can lead to its misuse which can be displayed on social media. Take deepfakes for instance; while deepfakes existed before genAI, there are now more concerns because genAI can create them so easily (The university of Arizona, n.d.). Deepfakes are digital alterations of real people that are often used to spread misinformation. Combined with the quick spread of social media post, instances like this impact social media in a negative way.

Governance

In my opinion, genAI is able deliver more value than harm to social media platforms. But this is only possible when companies ensure sufficient governance efforts. Fortunately, platforms have moved along with the progress of genAI by establishing policies. TikTok, for instance, ask users to label their content as AI generated in the case it is generated or edited by AI (TikTok, n.d.). This allows the content creators to be creative with the use of AI while at the same time protecting the users from being misled. Given the rapid improvements of genAI applications, social media companies should continue to monitor and update their governance when needed, to ensure qualitative contributions by genAI.

References:

Shepherd, I. (2024, March 10). How AI impacts social media content creation. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianshepherd/2024/03/10/how-will-ai-impact-social-media-content-creators/

The university of Arizona. (n.d.). What is a “deepfake?” And how can I recognize images that have been created with generative AI? – University of Arizona Libraries. https://ask.library.arizona.edu/faq/407977#:~:text=Deepfakes%20were%20around%20long%20before,them%20so%20easy%20to%20create.

TikTok. (n.d.). About AI-generated content. https://support.tiktok.com/en/using-tiktok/creating-videos/ai-generated-content

Universiteit van Amsterdam. (2025, August 29). Call for Papers: GeNAI & Creative Practices – Responsible Digital Transformations. Responsible Digital Transformations – University of Amsterdam. https://rdt.uva.nl/genai–creative-practices/conference/genai–creative-practices.html