Using ChatGPT
YES, you can use ChatGPT or other AI chat bots to help you with this project!
The key to avoiding misuse is to treat ChatGPT like a person. You can ask a person to give you suggestions or to proofread your writing. You can ask a person to give you ideas for a more descriptive word, or even say, "How would you say this sentence better?" But if you have the other person do any of the writing for you, that's plagiarism. AI makes this a challenge to balance, for sure, because it's so fast and powerful, and we have to rely on you to use your good judgement and your integrity.
You CAN
ask ChatGPT to help you get started. These are the types of prompts you can use:
"Can you give me ideas for the topic of my persuasive essay?"
"Here are the topics I'm choosing from for my persuasive essay. Can you help me decide which one I should do?"
"I'm doing a research for a persuasive essay on why therapy dogs should be in every school. Where should I begin?"
"Where can I find research about the use of AI in education?
"How do I organize my research and start working on my essay?"
"Can you give me a timeline for my essay assignment? I want to break it up parts I can manage."
"I feel stuck working on my persuasive essay. What can I do to get my thoughts flowing again?"
"Here's my rough draft. Can you give me suggestions for improving it?" (This one is tricky! For most writing assignments, you can NOT then say, "Now take those ideas and rewrite it." YOU need to do the edits yourself.)
You CAN NOT:
Use information from ChatGPT as research that you cite in your essay. You can ask it where to look, but this does NOT qualify as a reliable source
Put in the assignment and have ChatGPT write the essay.
Start writing your essay and have ChatGPT finish it.
Have ChatGPT write your essay and then put in some sentences here and there to make it look like your own. (Guess what? This makes for a bad essay anyway, so it doesn't help you at all.)