Should You Use AI to Write for You?

Harvard requires a policy (any policy!) for classes, and so here’s mine, followed by advice for students and others.

The Policy: Your goal is to produce the best work you are capable of. If AI helps you do that, great.

The Advice: Put the effort in.

1. The many talented people around you have high expectations for you and your work, whereas LLMs are trained by default to produce text at the level of the average document on the web. Ask yourself whether you can do better, and understand that others will inevitably judge you by the work you put your name on.

2. The first draft of a document any of us write by hand is usually pretty bad compared to one we put considerable effort into rewriting. The same is true with AI: The first draft it produces is usually inadequate; stopping there would be your (obvious!) mistake. But if you work hard teaching an agent the principles of how you want it to write, you can probably get it to improve enough to help you.