I’ve been using ChatGPT for 2 years now and have seen a dramatic improvement in its capacity to write. It has become my supervisor in many ways, as the questions I might ask one of my supervisors I can put to ChatGPT instead.
However, Academic Integrity must be maintained. It is incredibly easy to get ChatGPT to write just about anything, then make some minor adjustments, check or add references and it’s done. In business, this is great. In preparing lessons for teaching, this is great. In learning and writing a PhD thesis, this is not great. The whole point of education is to learn. If we let ChatGPT do everything for us, where’s the learning?
So, in case you’re using an AI to write a PhD thesis, and are sometimes concerned that using part of its answer might conflict with maintaining academic integrity, here’s the prompt you can use so that it leaves most of the writing up to you:
Please review this chapter as a PhD supervisor would, suggesting in-line refinements, theoretical frameworks, and methodological improvements to strengthen my literary analysis. Keep my original writing intact but enhance the argument where necessary, ensuring it aligns with PhD-level critical engagement.
Update this prompt to match your level of study.
ChatGPT can produce a document with clickable comments but the copy function doesn’t copy them yet. Each comment would need to be copied individually. Asking for an in-line comment is better.
Also note that you don’t have to take any of ChatGPT’s recommendations. It can’t really deal with more than 1200 words when analysing, and it can’t access the earlier parts of a long conversation or multiple conversations, and it can’t consider what you’ve already done before and what you’ll do next. Also, on the most basic level, it is word matching, so the theoretical framework it suggests might lexically match what you’re writing, but may not actually be relevant. And, what it says the first time will be different to what it says the second time. Refresh if the first analysis isn’t useful.
By using this prompt, you can get further ideas on areas you might have missed, in the same way that you could get further ideas from your supervisor, then do further research on them to help elevate your PhD writing, saving everyone time and maintaining your academic integrity.
Hope this helps!
