How to Use AI in Studying and Writing

Maryn Pope
21 hours ago
9 min read

By: Maryn Pope

AI has rapidly evolved to become an indispensable tool for a number of daily tasks. However, most people don’t realize the extent of AI capabilities or how to use them effectively. There are several different ways you can use AI to help with studying for school or your creative writing process. There are also several potential issues to keep in mind when using AI to ensure that you use the program ethically. Remember, AI is a tool that you can use, not a replacement for you. The best work is created in collaboration with AI, not only by AI.

In Academics:

Upload Information to Summarize

Several AI platforms can be used to summarize information. If you have a long text to read or multiple pages of notes, you can upload them to an AI platform and ask it to summarize the content and provide key points. You can also ask targeted or specific questions in regard to the material, such as asking what year a company was founded, based on the reading. Just be sure to double check that the information is accurate by asking the AI where in the text that information is from in the article. It should be able to highlight for you the exact paragraph that information is from. When it comes to asking AI questions based on the reading, it's important to ask only about facts, and not opinions. Remember, AI opinions are not opinions, but combinations of other information found online, which usually ends up going in an unrelated direction. Not to mention, most artificial intelligence platforms are programmed to please humans and will often mirror your own opinions and biases. If you need an opinion, start by asking yourself or others!

Study With Practice Questions

Probably my favorite way to use AI is by flipping the script: instead of asking AI questions, I have it ask me questions. Having an AI platform ask you practice questions is one of the best ways to study for tests and actually learn the information. You can upload your notes and ask the platform to create a test that looks exactly like what you’ll see on the real exam (ex. Create a test with thirty multiple choice questions and five short answer questions, based on the information provided). If you find you need more help with one specific aspect of the material, you can also ask AI to focus on just that. Remember to watch out for AI that may try to use information from other sources, if you go too far down the rabbit hole you may find the program starts to stray from the notes you provided.

If your test is entirely essay-style responses, you can give AI a list of practice questions and have it ask you each of them in turn. The platform will even give you a grade and tell you what you did well and what you could improve on in your answer. This is a great way to perfect essay-style responses and practice recalling them when presented with questions.

Help With Research

Some AI platforms can also help with research. You can ask AI to search the internet for articles related to a specific topic, and it will provide you with a list of citations and a brief description of what each article is about. While this is very similar to doing a basic google search yourself, AI can help make the process more efficient as well as help you organize and cite the information you gather. For example, if you’re writing a research paper that’s divided into specific sections, you can ask AI to go through your list of sources and find one source that applies best to that section. That way you can go straight to that source instead of scrolling through all of them trying to find the one you need.

Create Outlines

A common use for AI programs in academic writing is to create outlines for your paper. AI is great at creating outlines that can help guide your writing process and get you to a finished product quicker. For example, you can ask the program to make an outline for a five paragraph paper that compares two novels. The platform will give you a solid outline with suggestions and helpful tips to get you writing. However, you have to watch out for fully formed AI sentences. AI will likely provide you with a well-written hook or thesis for your paper, but you have to remember to use the outline only. Your words, thoughts, and opinions is what must go into the paper, not the AI’s.

Generate charts and graphs

A lesser-known use of AI is for generating charts and graphs. You can provide the program with a set of data and tell it to create a visually pleasing graph of that data, in whatever form you would like. You can also ask AI to make the chart without providing the data, but keep in mind that whatever data it finds online may not be correct. Either way, you will want to fact check the graph or chart that it provides, but using AI is a quick and easy way to create a visual on your data. You can also ask AI to provide insights on the data, such as to identify trends or make predictions.

Polish Your Work

Another one of my favorite uses of AI is to proofread and edit my work. You can upload a finished essay to an AI platform and ask it for suggestions on how to improve your writing. AI will often find grammatical errors and typos to fix, as well as offer critiques on how to make your writing more clear or smooth. If you feel like you want to improve a specific part of your writing, such as increasing word count while staying on topic, AI can offer suggestions about how to do that. However, there is one thing you have to consider when using AI this way. Often, the program will give you sample sentences to use or offer to rewrite the essay with the suggestions it gave you. Don’t fall into this trap. AI platforms are great at generating pretty sentences that actually mean nothing. Just because it adds big words and fancy phrases doesn't mean that it always makes a meaningful contribution to the essay. Not to mention, AI writing often reads as cold, since it lacks human touch. In the end, you want to ask AI to give you suggestions and critiques, but not rewritten work, and remember, you don’t have to implement every suggestion it offers, as AI doesn’t always know best.

In Creative Writing:

AI platforms can be used in various ways in creative writing and academic writing alike. It can be used to help authors break free of their writer’s block, assist in their writing process, or to proofread and edit completed work. These are the main ways to use AI in creative writing, as it's always important not to use AI as the writer, but to use your own creativity. Remember to always check AI policies if you plan to submit your work to be published. Impressions’ AI policy is as follows:

*AI Policy: Impressions functions as an outlet for writers and artists to express themselves and showcase their human creativity. As such, we do not encourage the use of AI and we will not accept writing or images that are fully or partially generated by AI. However, we do allow creators to use AI to aid their process so long as AI is not responsible for any part of the completed work. For example, AI can be used to create outlines, suggest inspiration, or help proofread and edit grammar. If you decide to use AI in any way in your work, we ask that you include a content warning in your submission that explains how AI was used. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at impressions@my.maryvillecollege.edu.

Ask for Writing Prompts or Exercises

A simple use of AI in creative writing is to ask for writing prompts or writing exercises. If you want to write, but don’t have an idea to write about, writing prompts can be very helpful to provide inspiration for a story. Similarly, writing exercises can help you overcome writer’s block and put words on the page. There is one caveat to this, which is that often AI will create writing prompts from stories that have already been written. You can use these for practice of course, but if you’re looking to publish your work, you’ll want to double check that it isn’t accidentally based off a preexisting story.

Convert Research Into Useful Information

Just like with research for essays, you can use AI to do research for creative writing. It can find information about a specific time period (such as for historical fiction) or how to treat a wound (for a hero with a battle scar). You can even ask AI to describe the process of how something works that you may be unfamiliar with, but want to include in your story. If you’re still struggling, you can ask the program to describe a feeling or setting that you want to include, but that you cannot describe yourself. When doing this, it is important to remember that AI works by compiling information found on the internet, so the writing it generates may be useful for helping you see life as a peasant in the middle ages, but it may also be stealing not only from historical texts but other historical fiction.

Practice Conversations

For a uniquely creative fiction approach, you can ask AI to practice having conversations with you as a character. You can do this by either describing a character to AI or by providing it with a piece of your work that includes that character. Then you can proceed to have a conversation with the AI, pretending to be characters in your story. This can help you as a writer either better develop a character that you were struggling with or give you ideas about how a character might respond to different events. It can also help you practice refining the voice of the character you play in the conversation, if you chose to play as the protagonist in a first person narrated story. This method may not always work, you may find that the AI goes in a different direction than you wanted it to, and sometimes asking a question in character may lead to a detailed answer out of character. Nevertheless, this is a great practice tool and you can use it to help flesh-out characters that need more personality.

Use AI as a Workshop

Similar to using AI to proofread and edit essays, you can use it to workshop your pieces as well. However, you may encounter the same pitfalls, such as AI sentences that don’t have meaning or phrases taken from other works. This is why you always want to double-check the source of AI content, and don’t use lines that sound too good to be true. AI should only be used in this way to offer general suggestions and not to write the story for you. Once again, you don’t have to use every suggestion it offers. Use your best judgement to determine what is a good critique and what is garbage.

AI Disclosure

AI was used in making this blog post in the following ways:

Before I listed any of the above uses of AI, I tested each of them on an AI platform, mostly ChatGPT or Claude to ensure that they work. Keep in mind that the platform you use and the wording of your input will affect the results you are given.
This blog was proofread by AI, and some editing suggestions were implemented to improve clarity and flow.
After I had researched and picked the articles I wanted to list under “further reading”, I used AI to create the citations listed, then I added a brief description of what each article was about.