AI in academic writing can be an accelerator or a brake, a tool or a crutch. Used appropriately, it can facilitate deeper learning and skills development. But applied inappropriately, it diminishes authentic thinking and growth.
Educators are feeling the pressure of AI’s impact in the modern learning landscape and their role in nurturing students’ responsible, ethical use of generative AI tools. It isn’t realistic to simply ask students not to use AI. That approach denies students the opportunity to acquire future-ready AI skills and develop a critical approach to learning tools.
Rather than educators and students being at odds over the use of AI, they need to be partners in developing a critical and positive relationship with the technology. Instructors play a key role in supporting students to thrive in the age of AI , helping them make ethical use of AI to optimize, rather than undermine, their educational outcomes.
The benefits of AI in academic writing—an enabler for student learning
AI-powered platforms can be powerful enablers of student learning, offering support throughout the writing process, and helping educators provide more tailored and impactful feedback. In a recent report into generative AI in education , academics describe AI’s “unprecedented capabilities for personalized learning journeys and to streamline assessment processes”. Here are some key tools and uses of AI for learners.
AI support during the research phase
Tools like Elicit and Perplexity can search and summarize source materials quickly and easily, giving students more time to assess and synthesize their contents (although there are risks, see below). AI tutors like Socratic and Khanmigo summarize complex concepts to help students get to grips with difficult topics.
AI tools during the writing process
AI writing tools like ChatGPT can support students by serving as an interactive writing companion, offering personalized assistance to improve drafts. These tools can help students identify areas for improvement in style, tone, and coherence, while also suggesting ways to enhance vocabulary and sentence structure. Students can receive instant feedback and gain insights into how to better organize their thoughts, supporting revision efforts.
AI tools for accessibility
There is a growing suite of AI tools designed to support accessibility and diverse learning styles, such as converting text-to-speech for learners to listen to notes, or speech-to-text, to convert audio content to a written format.
AI skills for the future workforce
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 finds 86% of employers expect AI to have a transformative impact on their businesses by 2030. When students experiment critically with AI, they develop invaluable technical and intellectual skills for their future careers.
Used to accelerate and augment their authentic writing processes, AI tools can provide students with support to self-assess and improve their work before submission, as well as develop invaluable professional skills.
The drawbacks of AI in academic writing—a crutch and constraint
While AI can offer valuable support, misuse or overreliance can stunt student development. The main risk of AI in academic writing is that students simply enter a prompt into a genAI tool like ChatGPT, generate an answer, and submit it as their own work without any meaningful engagement with the output. In this scenario, there are a lot of issues at play.
Indiscriminate use of AI weakens skill development
When students use AI to do the heavy lifting in the writing process, it denies them the opportunity to develop essential writing, research, and critical thinking skills. There’s no requirement to engage critically with content, develop arguments, or refine their writing style.
Overuse of AI limits authentic growth
By using AI to generate written work with a click, instead of creating it through personal effort and diligence, students risk prioritizing product over process. This shortcut mentality limits their engagement with the process of learning and undermines the very point of education. Something students may come to regret…
AI risks inaccurate or biased outputs
As mentioned above, while AI is advancing, it isn’t foolproof. It is known to hallucinate—returning sources and information that are inaccurate or entirely falsified. Plus, it has been trained on materials that reflect the intrinsic biases of society. This risks students learning from—and submitting—inaccurate information.
AI misuse undermines academic integrity
Educators are already seeing that students can struggle to differentiate between AI assistance and misconduct, particularly if an institution’s AI use policies aren’t clear. When learners engage in uncritical—or deliberately unethical—use of AI, it erodes their academic integrity and devalues genuine academic effort, creating an unfair playing field for all learners.
While AI in academic writing can successfully augment authentic student learning processes, the risk of misuse—whether deliberate or borne from a skill gap—remains of paramount importance to educators. Unchecked, AI use can significantly undermine student outcomes, the validity of academic qualifications, and the reputation of the institution itself. So how can educators tackle it?
The importance of visibility and instruction
To ensure that AI in academic writing is an enabler and not a crutch, educators need to adapt traditional pedagogical practices.
Numerous research studies recognize the challenge of integrating AI in a way that augments rather than undermines learning outcomes, and educators have a responsibility to familiarize themselves with AI capabilities to properly understand both the opportunity and the risk.
The GenAI Readiness Framework is one way to assess your awareness ( Luckin, Cukurova, Kent, and du Boulay, 2022) and Turnitin has a range of educator resources available to increase your AI knowledge , including guides and a glossary.
As educators learn about AI, students need instruction too. Aside from mastering functionality of Gen AI tools, the emphasis should be on how to use them ethically and appropriately to reach the best learning outcome. In a pro-AI landscape, it can be hard for learners to distinguish between AI assistance and AI-empowered plagiarism. Teachers play a key role in educating students on how to integrate AI into their processes thoughtfully—to personalize learning experiences, accelerate routine tasks, and self-assess—but not to replace original thought. You may want to direct students to this article on AI writing for students .
Beyond education on AI use cases and what constitutes cheating in the age of AI , students need guidance to support their authentic writing processes and confidence. To enable this, educators need greater visibility into the student writing process.
Visibility provides instructors with the ability to distinguish between authentic student-generated work and generative AI content, and to make interventions as necessary—guiding students through research and drafting, then writing and submission stages.
This support both discourages inappropriate AI shortcuts and makes detection easier, should they still occur.
Three tactics to nurture original student writing
1. Emphasize the importance of process, not just product
It’s easy to see why students are tempted by AI and other fast tracks to ‘success’. They can feel that their future depends on their performance in summative assessments and that ‘getting the grade’ is more important than how they achieved it.
A key role of educators is to help students reframe their understanding of success in education. While grades and attainment are still paramount, by refocusing on incremental growth and authentic learning, you can protect students from the siren song of academic shortcuts.
- Scaffold the learning journey : Break the writing process down into smaller steps, such as outlining and drafting, to help students focus on development and improvement.
- Incorporate formative assessment : Provide feedback throughout the learning process, not just final submissions. Recognize and reward effort, and provide constructive feedback on drafts.
- Use reflective writing : Encourage students to reflect on their learning process, including how they approached research and drafting, plus any use of AI within the process.
2. Integrate writing transparency into your assessments
Asking students to ‘show their workings’ and demonstrate how they arrived at the final piece of work adds a layer of transparency that’s especially important when AI tools are in the mix. It encourages integrity and accountability in the writing process and emphasizes the value of iteration and improvement over time. This can help students avoid the lure of shortcuts and makes it more difficult to pass off entirely AI-generated work as their own.
- Require assignment drafts: Ask students to submit multiple drafts alongside their final work to demonstrate the progress and refinement of their writing over time.
- Use feedback loops : Integrate circular processes that require students to act on feedback and comment on how they have incorporated instructor guidance into their work.
- Ask for research logs: Require students to submit information on how they researched their paper, what sources they used, and why.
3. Use integrity tools to promote responsible AI use
In response to AI disruption, other tools have evolved to address the challenges it presents. In terms of AI in academic writing, specialized integrity software can detect AI-generated content and flag it to instructors, acting as a deterrent to AI misuse with respect to AI use policies.
Not only that, but it also provides a clear and detailed record of the student writing process, and their progress. This enhanced visibility makes it easier for educators to identify discrepancies in student work that warrant further review and intervention. Measurable indicators of how effectively students are engaging with authentic writing include:
- Large unattributed copy-and-paste sections—this may be AI-generated content passed off as original work
- Shorter editing time than an original assignment would require—this could suggest the content has been retyped from an AI tool or other source
- Unexplained changes in writing style—sudden shifts in voice, argument, or complexity could signal the introduction of AI content
By introducing these safeguards in the student learning experience, educators create an environment where AI and academic integrity can co-exist. Pedagogy that focuses on writing transparency builds trust in the use of AI in education to improve outcomes and equips learners with successful student writing strategies to do their best, original work.