Challenges and Opportunities Of Students Using AI To Write Essays

Introduction

Is it surprising to know about students using AI to write essays? For many English teachers, the rise of AI has created new questions about writing instruction, student learning, and the future of the traditional essay.

With AI’s continued growth and advancements, many English teachers like myself often wonder whether the essay is a dead, useless writing assignment. After all, why task students with writing an essay stating their opinion on whether it’s better to live in a big city or a small town when a detailed prompt in ChatGPT can quickly do that for them? This concern is at the center of the conversation surrounding students using AI to write essays: if AI can generate a published response in seconds, what value (if any) does the writing process still provide?

There’s no denying, of course, that tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, and Mistral have leveled the playing field when it comes to personalizing learning experiences and helping students learn material in ways never imagined. Benefits such as providing students with feedback, supporting revision, and creating new opportunities for learning are important to acknowledge when considering the role of AI in education.

However, there is an opportunity cost to using these tools. While students using AI to write essays can benefit from additional support, there are legimitate concerns about over-reliance, critical thinking, creativity, and academic integrity. This puts teachers between a rock and a hard palce: how can we allow students to benefit from AI while still ensuring they develop the writing skills, independence, and reasoning abilities they need?

Let’s explore the challenges and opportunities of students using AI to write essays, along with a few strategies I use to guide students towards responsible and meaningful AI use.

Pros of AI in Essay Writing

In an earlier blog post, one idea I touched on what having students use AI as both a writing assistant and reading assistant. Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for student thinking, this approach positions AI as a tool that can support the writing process when they’re taught how to use it responsibly.

This method of students using AI to write essays helps them use AI more critically, allowing it to review their work and make recommendations based on factors such as clarity, coherence, organization, development of ideas, or even rubric items provided to them by you. In other words, students aren’t just asking AI to generate an essay and call it a day. Rather, they’re using it as a feedback tool to analyze and improve their own writing. This distinction is important because effective AI integration requires students to remain active decision-makers throughout the writing process.

When teachers consider how to approach students using AI to write essays, the goal should be developing students’ ability to evaluate AI feedback, determine whether its suggestions are useful, and make intentional revisions to their work. This process builds critical thinking skills while helping students become more independent, confident writers.

In this instance, students using AI to write essays benefits them by:

• overcoming writer’s block
• improving grammar and style
• personalizing feedback
• improving accessibility
• incorporating different writing styles

These benefits are valuable because many students struggle not so much with ideating but with developing, organizing, and refining their ideas into a polished piece of writing. AI can serve as an additional layer of support by helping students identify areas for improvement that they may not have noticed on their own.

Of the benefits, I’ve found that improving grammar and style is perhaps the biggest one, especially when students often tend to write formal essays informally. Many of them have developed writing habits that feel natural but may not align with the expectations of academic writing. In this instance, using AI as a revision assistant gives them immediate feedback on sentence structure, word choice, tone, and conventions, areas that can significantly improve the quality of their writing.

However, the most important part of students using AI to write essays is the conversation that happens after AI provides feedback. They still need to evaluate suggestions, explain their choices, and understand why a revision improves their writing. When used this way, students using AI to write essays are engaging with the writing process more deeply.

Cons of AI in Essay Writing

While students using AI to write essays in a support role has its benefits, there are legitimate concerns associated with it. As AI tools become more accessible, teachers need to consider not only how these tools can support writing instruction but also how they may impact student learning, independence, and ownership of the writing process.

Those cons include:

• plagiarizing
• questioning academic integrity
• lack of critical thinking
• lack of creativity and originality

One of the biggest challenges with students using AI to write essays is determing whether the final product accurately represents their own thinking and writing ability. The fact that they’re able to quickly produce an essay via AI prompts does bring into question plagiarism (Meta’s recent troubles of pirating 82TB of books comes into question) and academic integrity. When students rely too much on AI-generated content, teachers may struggle to determine how much of the work reflects their ideas, efforts, and understanding versus how much was generated by an AI tool.

This, unfortunately, makes it more difficult to determine a student’s authenticity in completing the assignment and how much of it was them and how much was AI. This challenge is especially important in writing assignments because of the process of brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing is often where students develop their communication skills and deepen their understanding of a topic. If students using AI to write essays completes too much of that process, they may miss valuable opportunities for growth.

What about lack of critical thinking, creativity, and originality? These, unfortunately, tie into a bigger issue of students using AI to write essays: cognitive offloading and AI over-reliance.

Cognitive Offloading and AI Over-reliance

In his paper “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking“, Gerlich (2025) states that cognitive offloading “involves using external tools to reduce the cognitive load on an individual’s working memory. While this can free up cognitive resources, it may also lead to a decline in cognitive engagement and skill development.”

It’s important to note that cognitive offloading isn’t necessarily a negative practice. We have always used external tools—calculators, notes, reference materials—to support thinking and improve efficiency. However, the concern with AI arises when students begin outsourcing their thinking process rather than using AI to enhance their own reasoning, creativity, and decision-making.

For students using AI to write essays, this means that as they continue to use it for that purpose—or even complete other writing-based assignments—they might experience a decline in their own writing abilities and critical thinking skills, leading to an over-reliance on AI to do everything (much like they may over-rely on Google search to find answers to questions for any given assignment). Instead of wrestling with ideas via productive struggle, organizing their rhoughts, and revising their work, students may become too dependent on AI-generated suggestions without fully understanding the reasoning behind them or developing the nuance necessary to evaluate them.

This, unfortunately, creates a challenge for writing instruction because the process of writing is where much learning occurs. Brainstorming ideas, selecting evidence, structuring arguments, or revising drafts all require students to engage in higher-order thinking. If AI consistently completes these steps for students, they may prduce stronger-looking final products while simultaneously developing weaker writing and reasoning skills.

Thus, the key issue isn’t students simply using AI to write essays: it’s whether students are using AI as a partner in the writing process or as a replacement for their own thnking.

Mitigating Cognitive Offloading and AI Over-reliance

How, then, can ELA teachers mitigate cognitive offloading and AI over-reliance? Here are some things I’ve done in my class to offset students using AI to write essays.

Limit AI use in the beginning

At the beginning of the school year, the first thing I did was talk about AI and how it works, providing them with real-time examples of AI outputs for various assignments and assessments we’ll be doing in class. After that, I tell them that we’ll implement use of AI gradually to help them understand how to use it to their benefit.

Prior to doing that, though, I focus a lot on traditional writing instruction. Whether it’s reviewing basics such as subjects and predicates, creating compound-complex sentences out of a set of simple sentences, or more advanced topics like determining an appropriate organizational pattern for an essay, doing this ensures that students have a solid understanding of writing’s fundamental principles before using AI tools.

For me, doing this also reduces the likelihood of my students using AI to write essays.

Assign student-first writing assignments

Continuing with the limitation of AI use, I have students complete assignments that are student-first, meaning they’re assignments that require them to demonstrate their own voice, perspective, and analytical abilities.

One example of this is the 11-Minute essay. By having students respond to a truism in a timed essay where each part is allocated a certain amount of time for writing, I’m creating the conditions where students are not only meeting the requirements of demonstrating the aforementioned but also reducing the likelihood of them cognitively offloading the assignment.

Assignments like the 11-Minute Essay (or even reflective writing pieces) help reduces students using AI to write essays.

Require hand-written essays before using AI

When I assign an essay, I always require students to write them by hand (or via assistive technology for students whose accommodations require it). When they’ve completed their first draft, I have a one-on-one conference to ask them about ideas in their essay and offer tips and suggestions for revision and editing.

I should note, though, that I don’t help students find all of their mistakes when reviewing their first drafts. I mention to them where similar mistakes in their essay are and ask them to try and find the other mistakes on their own as they begin writing their second draft, keeping my feedback in mind.

Once we’ve reviewed the second draft together, I tell them to prompt AI to review their draft once more based on the rubric’s criteria, copy/paste the essay rubric after their prompt, and review AI’s suggestions and tips. This also gives them an opportunity to see if AI met the criteria or caught errors that they (or even I) didn’t catch the first or second time.

Doing this shows how students using AI to write essays can become more purposeful as opposed to a simple copy-and-paste .

Final Thoughts

Students using AI to write essays presents both challenges and opportunities.

While AI can be a valuable tool for supporting students in their academy journey, it’s important for ELA teachers to address the risks AI poses to cognitive offload and AI over-reliance as well as plagiarism. Considering this, the question still remains: is the essay worth assigning to students? For me, it absolutely still is.

Have you removed the essay as an assignment in your class, or have you changed your approach to assigning it? Let me know in the comments!