OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT has taken the world by storm since its November 2022 launch. Users have been flocking to OpenAI’s experiment site to play with the bot with the only requirement being a simple prompt that makes ChatGPT jump into action and produce just about anything that the user wants.
In this article, we’re talking about how to use ChatGPT to write essays.
Also read: Top 3 ChatGPT alternatives
Writing essays with ChatGPT
Writing an essay using ChatGPT is surprisingly easy. All you have to do is create an OpenAI account and use it to access the bot. Afterwards, just tell the bot the essay topic and length and sit back as it pulls together all the information it has to prepare your essay.
Just follow these three easy steps.
Step 1: Head over to the ChatGPT website and log in with your credentials or create an account if you don’t have one.
Step 2: Enter a prompt for ChatGPT. Make sure to go into as much detail as required for your essay. Remember, the more detailed your prompt is the better ChatGPT’s generated essay is going to be, besides being more accurate and relevant to the topic.
If you’d like to replicate our result, here’s the prompt we used.
Generate a 500 word essay on how future dystopian society will be affected by cycling robots that do everything in their power to restore the earth to its former greenery, bring back the dinosaurs and invent time travel at the same time all while making sure that humans continue to evolve in a healthy manner and become more intelligent beings.
Step 3: If you feel like the bot hasn’t provided a long enough essay or missed out on a particular point, you can always tell it to write an extension or provide more context about a specific issue. If you’d like another draft, click the Regenerate response button at the bottom.
While ChatGPT’s output might very well be good enough for a direct submission, we highly recommend that you read through the essay, look for factual inaccuracies and edit it to ensure consistent tone, accuracy and structure. Additionally, you might also want to change the initial prompt depending on how close the generated output was to your liking.
Using GPT4 to generate your essays
Also keep in mind that if you’re using the free version of ChatGPT, you’ll be limited to GPT3.5. One of the biggest disadvantages here is that the bot doesn’t have much knowledge of the world post-2021. So if your essay is based on a relatively modern topic, that’s going to be a problem for ChatGPT.
You can work around this issue using two solutions:
- Buy ChatGPT Plus for $20/month to get access to GPT4 and additional features such as lower wait times and early access to new features and improvements.
- Use Bing Chat (based on GPT4)
Both of these methods will give you access to GPT4 which is the latest LLM model from OpenAI and can provide better answers as compared to the free version of ChatGPT, which is based on GPT3.5. Alternatively, you can also use Bing Compose, a neat AI feature in Microsoft Edge’s Bing sidebar that allows you to quickly generate paragraphs, emails, blog posts and ideas of varying lengths and in different tones right within your browser.
Also read: ChatGPT error code 1020: Quick Fix
