You can use an AI tool like ChatGPT to check your writing and offer suggestions for improving its quality. But before you do...
Tools like ChatGPT will often rewrite the work that you want checked. When you do this, the words are no longer your own. What do we call it when you use someone (or something) else's words? Plagiarism! You can't get AI tools to rewrite your work for you because the rewritten text is not your words, they're the work of the AI tool! So don't copy and paste rewritten work into your documents. You need to make sure that what goes into the tool and what comes out of it are your words, so you need to explicitly state in your prompt that you do not want anything rewritten.
So long as the tool is only reviewing your work and not rewriting it, AI tools can be very useful. Here are examples of prompts that you could use (don't forget to add "do not rewrite" as necessary):
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when using generative AI tools for proofreading:
Like other uses of generative AI tools, there are some things you need to be aware of:
These tools may overcorrect work. AI tools might fail to grasp the context or recognise deliberate grammar and style choices that you might have used. A human proofreader would be more likely to recognise these and leave alone. You don't have to accept every suggestion that's made. Blindly accepting every suggestion might mean that your distinctive writing voice is lost.
There's no guarantee you'll get the same suggestions each time you ask a piece of work to be checked. That's just the nature of these tools. They don't learn from feedback and can't adapt suggestions based on user preferences (unless of course you're specifying everything in a prompt, but what's the point of that?)
You are more intelligent than these tools. Just as you shouldn't accept every change suggested by an AI, you should trust your own judgment; you understand why you wrote something the way you did, while an AI tool does not. These tools often struggle with style, nuance, and technical terminology. AI tools are trained on a vast body of text and recognise patterns, so they might suggest alterations that make your work resemble what they know from their training data. These suggestions may not be suitable for your writing and could change the writing voice. Additionally, they are not effective with formatted text, such as tables and bullet points, which might mess up some of their suggestions
AI tools are useful for proofing, but don't rely on them; make sure a human has the final say on proofing your work.
