Essays are a vital part of many university courses but can be difficult to write if you’re new to academic writing or if English isn’t your first language. Students often resort to using an AI essay writer to speed up and simplify the process. But which are the best options? And how should one use an AI essay writer? This blogpost will list the top AI essay writers available to students and answer various questions you may have about using an AI essay writer.
Paperpal
Paperpal offers a free outline generator and essay writer, which helps you structure your ideas and present your arguments as logically and coherently as possible. Another useful feature is the integrated Reference Finder, which allows you to ask questions in simple English and get factual responses with supporting citations. Paperpal also helps you polish up your essay with its proofreader and format your citations and references automatically.
Jenni
Jenni’s AI writing assistant gives users writing suggestions, rather than generate an entire essay. In this way, you are in complete control of the content and ideas in your essay. The Edit feature helps you further refine your writing and the Review feature gives constructive feedback on your essay. You also get to set your citation style and choose the date range of your citations before you start your essay. Jenni also has an AI chat feature (limited in the free version) that you can use if you’re struggling with writer’s block.
Grammarly
Grammarly’s AI writer handles not just academic essays but also blogposts, social media posts, or emails. You do need to choose the right tone and input any key points you want the AI writer to cover, and the dropdown for tone didn’t seem to work when I used it.
The actual content is written in just one click. Of note, Grammarly doesn’t provide citations the way Paperpal does, so it’s less useful for any academic essay beyond high school. But it can help you with outlines and other types of academic communication, like cover letters or application letters.
NoteGPT
NoteGPT allows students to generate an entire essay in seconds or step by step. You can choose from college, high school, graduate, doctoral, and professional levels and also preset your word limit. It doesn’t require you to sign up or create an account. You can also upload your own drafts or even just bullet points for the tool to use. I found it significantly slower than other tools, however. The reference list drew heavily from arXiv preprints, the tool assumed my essay was about economics (when it was actually sociology!), and the number of references was way too few
FreeEssayWriter
Like NoteGPT, FreeEssayWriter allows students to generate outlines or essays without having to sign up. It has an easy-to-fill form, where you have to enter the topic, word limit, citation style, etc. It can also summarize existing articles or books for your reference, and help you create structured lab reports and compelling personal statements.
Of note, the tool gave me a “doctoral” level essay with just 3 references and no in-text citations. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend it for any academic essay.
Litero
Litero’s Outline Generator and Autosuggest features can help you create a complete essay without compromising on your voice or style. It also suggests sources from Google Scholar for you to cite, and formats them for you in various styles. Like Paperpal, it has a built-in plagiarism checker and AI detector, so you can easily identify any duplicate text or robotic-sounding sections and rework them. The tool will give you just 10 sources, though, which could be a problem for any essay beyond high school. But on the plus side, the sources it found for me were from reputed journals and publishers, and there is an option to add your own sources.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why can’t I use a general LLM like ChatGPT for my essays?
General, all-purpose LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude can spit out large amounts of text that looks like a real essay but may not actually secure you a good grade. Hallucination is a common problem: LLMs end up “making up” their own content, which may be wildly inaccurate. Remember the guy who ended up in hospital1 because he asked ChatGPT about a substitution for table salt and ChatGPT told him to use sodium BROMIDE instead? You need to be very careful that you are not using fabricated nonsense in your essay. It’s very difficult even for experienced academics and researchers to spot hallucinations, because the LLM output is very plausible.
2. Can I just copy-paste the output from an AI essay generator?
No, AI essay generators are tools to help you write more easily, focus your ideas, and relieve you from mundane tasks like formatting and spacing. They can’t replace your opinions, creativity, or interpretations. Practically all decent universities have strict consequences if you submit a completely AI-generated essay for any course.
3. How can students use an AI essay generator ethically?
Using an AI essay generator responsibly is actually quite simple, and tools like Paperpal have features to help you comply with an institutional ethical requirements.
- Remain in control: review the outline and any content suggestions before adding them to your essay
- Add your personal insights and opinions: AI cannot add this for you. It can tell you that public expenditure on education is inversely related to fertility rate, but you have to decide whether this is a good or bad thing. Paperpal can give you a reference-backed description of the causes of malnutrition. But you have to decide which should be prioritized by public policy.
- Use an AI detector to check for text that sounds like it’s copy-pasted from an LLM. Rewrite these sections manually, varying sentence structure.
- Disclose the use of AI: If you’ve used AI responsibly and ethically, you shouldn’t feel the need to hide it. Always check your institution’s guidelines. For example, Monash University2 has detailed guidelines on when and how students can use generative AI.
References
