08/04/2025

Encouraging Students to Treat AI as a Writing Support Tool—Not an Idea Generator

by Thomas Hipkin

Image credit: Paul Franck's The Proper Art of Writing (Nürnberg: Bey Paulus Fürsten Kunsthändlern, 1655), artist unknown. https://archive.org/details/kunstrichtigesch00fran/page/16/mode/2up 

Should the College Writing Centre Embrace Generative AI?

Since the release of ChatGPT in the fall of 2022, nearly every corner of the academic ecosystem has been touched in some way by the widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence. But one corner of the higher education environment, for better or worse, remains largely untouched by these seismic shifts: the college writing centre.

In contrast to the ever-increasing number of AI-generated submissions I receive from students in my classes, the writing that students bring to me at the writing centre is almost always their own. The reason for this is straightforward: the students who use the writing centre are those keen on improving their communication skills. These students are among the least likely to use AI the wrong way, that is, in any way that would not just run afoul of academic integrity expectations, but more generally that would replace the work of reading, thinking, and writing that form the core of what a liberal education aims to develop. Beyond this, though, many of our tutees abstain from using AI at all, even in ways consistent with academic honesty and rigour.

While I broadly sympathize with these learners’ AI scepticism, as someone whose role is to help position students for success I worry that by encouraging such a fastidious attitude to all things AI, I may be undermining their competitiveness in an academic environment and a wider economy that have already been irrevocably altered by AI. Perhaps as writing tutors we can do more to help students navigate the largely uncharted waters of academic writing in the post-ChatGPT era.

Guiding Students on AI Use

Broaching the topic of AI with students can be touchy. Given the taboo around AI use in educational settings, many will deny ever having used it when asked. But writing tutors are in a better position to engage openly with students than are the professors who grade their work. Once students are assured that we are not out to police their academic integrity, they often open up about their own experiences and ask for guidance on what uses of AI are permissible.

Before we can provide students with clear, actionable guidance on AI use, we first need to determine what uses of AI we as educators want to condone. Here again, writing tutors are well-positioned to offer some input. In my own practice, I have found it helpful to distinguish between using AI to generate ideas, which should be avoided, and using it to support writing, which I have begun to cautiously embrace. Let me clarify the distinction.

Generating Ideas vs. Supporting Writing

Much has been said about the risks of hallucination, bias, and intellectual property misuse posed by AI, and I don’t want to relitigate these issues here. But I do want to note that these problems tend to arise when AI is used as an information source rather than as a language tool. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are not knowledge engines; they’re predictive text generators. By ensuring that the ideas on which that text is based come from themself and not the LLM, the prudent user maintains control over the content of their writing and keeps it free from most problems associated with AI.

This control begins with good prompt design. Students should be specific and directive, providing sufficient context and stipulating the form they want the response to take. Vague or open-ended prompts leave too much room for AI to inject unreliable or generic content. The more students guide the model, the more of their own voice and vision is preserved in its responses.

Students should also reflect on what tasks AI should be used to support. I caution students against using AI for help with brainstorming or outlining. These early stages of the writing process are when students synthesize what they have learned and apply it to the task at hand. Handing that work to an AI forfeits this important cognitive process.

Even when AI is used to “kickstart” ideas, it risks narrowing rather than expanding students’ thinking. As a tutor, I know that suggesting ideas often limits a student’s creativity, especially when the suggestion comes from a perceived authority like a tutor or LLM. Students latch onto the “right” answer instead of exploring alternatives. An LLM doesn’t prompt ideas; it responds to prompts. It can’t ask the probing, open questions that help students clarify their own thinking. Until AI tools can replicate a tutor’s discretion, they don’t belong in the idea-generation phase.

AI as a Writing Support

That said, there are valuable uses for AI later in the writing process. The effective user of genAI understands that its true potential lies not in its party-trick act of masquerading as a knowledgeable interlocutor, but in its mastery of language usage. When students already have ideas and drafts, an LLM can help them express those ideas more clearly and fluently.

For example, they can ask AI to rephrase a clunky sentence, suggest synonyms, or adjust the tone of a paragraph. They can input their own writing and request structural suggestions or ask for explanations of professor feedback they don’t understand.

In all these cases, AI is being used to help the student articulate their own knowledge, not replace it. The student’s ideas remain central, and AI becomes a language tool, like a grammar checker or thesaurus, just more powerful and context-sensitive.

Concerns and Caveats

Some may argue that communication skills are themselves part of what we aim to assess. But if every assignment relies on students’ writing skills to demonstrate the knowledge we are grading, weaker language skills can obscure other competencies we hope to evaluate. Writing centres exist, in part, to bridge that gap. When used appropriately, AI can support this mission by helping students translate ideas from their minds to the page.

We should also ask whether there’s a meaningful difference between assessing a student’s innate writing ability and their technology-mediated writing ability. If spellcheckers and thesauruses are acceptable, not to mention writing centre support, then why not AI? This question is all the more acute if assistance from these technologies is already accepted, and perhaps even expected, in the workplace.

This doesn’t mean AI writing assistance should be permitted without limits. Policies should reflect the specific learning outcomes of a course. As a writing instructor, I restrict what writing supports my students can use since writing skills are the core of what I’m teaching and assessing. But where writing is just the medium for demonstrating subject knowledge, allowing students to use AI to help articulate that knowledge is both fair and consistent with how we increasingly communicate in the real world.

As long as students are using AI to help them clearly communicate their own knowledge, rather than to replace that knowledge with other people’s ideas, then perhaps it can complement the support provided by writing instructors and tutors like me. The challenge for those of us who support students is to help them navigate this new technology and reframe its use as something that can be consistent with academic integrity when approached openly and thoughtfully. By impressing on students the crucial difference between using AI to generate ideas for them and using it to support their own writing, we can give them clear, practical guidance on a topic that is all too often shrouded in deceit and confusion.

Acknowledgement: The writing of this blog was assisted in places with suggestions for concision and phrasing from Copilot. The ideas are all the writer’s own.

Thomas Hipkin is a tutor in the writing centre at Humber Polytechnic in Toronto, Canada, where he also teaches as a professor in the Department of English.

The authors' views are their own.

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