Taking a stance: AI generated vs student written argumentative essays.

The emergence of ChatGPT has created considerable anxiety among teachers concerned that students might turn to Artificial Intelligence programmes to write their assignments. This AI-powered language model is able to create grammatically accurate and coherent texts, thus potentially enabling cheating and undermining literacy and critical thinking skills. Comparisons between ChatGPT texts and human writing, however, remain underexplored and so we address this issue here by focusing on a central aspect of effective argument: the ability to convey an effective stance. We do this by comparing stance markers in A-level argumentative essays written by British students with those generated by ChatGPT on the same topics. Our findings show that ChatGPT uses significantly fewer epistemic and attitudinal stance markers and exhibits far less authorial presence in its essays. We also found that the students expressed stance using a wider range of lexical items which displayed more nuanced expressions to convey stronger emotions and more engaging argumentation. We attribute these distinct patterns in ChatGPT’s output to the language data used to train the model and its underlying statistical algorithms. The study suggests a number of pedagogical implications for incorporating ChatGPT in writing instruction.