2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) has provided students and educators in engineering fields with countless opportunities and complex challenges. The prospects of using AI-powered sophisticated tools for crafting well-structured, coherent, and compelling essays in higher learning institutions are both promising and potentially problematic for students and faculty pursuing the use of AI to enhance learning in the classroom. AI offers distinctive benefits to students such as real-time feedback, grammar and style suggestions, and content generation assistance. AI is also able to analyze students’ writing styles and provide instant feedback on the areas that need further improvement and modification which can lead to an iterative and self-improving process that would be beneficial to the professional development of future engineers. Many AI writing tools are freely available to students at no cost, making this resource accessible to all. Despite the advantages, AI may provide students with some misleading information and outdated data. AI tools are also highly dependent on the phrasing of the prompts, potentially leading to suggestions that stifle creativity or misinterpret students' intentions. AI-generated text is unable to capture the nuance, context, and subjective nature of writing, making the AI responses have a voice distinctive from the voice of the individual. In addition, like any other evolutionary technology, there are increasing concerns regarding the ethical implications of AI in education that must be carefully studied.

With these factors in mind, an engineering technical writing class was used to further examine the evolving landscape of academic writing and detect the domains in which students and educators can appropriately utilize AI tools. In this regard, several writing tasks were outlined, wherein undergraduate engineering students were asked to write with and without AI’s assistance in order to explore the pros and cons of using natural language processing (NLP) models for technical writing and gauge the interest and enthusiasm of students in utilizing AI tools. Then, a comprehensive comparative analysis was conducted to analyze several factors including writing style, the structure of paragraphs, the accuracy of numerical data, and the empathetic language of the essays written by students and those generated by AI. In light of the analysis conducted, this paper aims to identify and explain the advantages and disadvantages of relying on AI tools and emphasize the need for careful consideration of ethical and pedagogical aspects to ensure a harmonious integration of AI into the educational landscape. Recommendations for best practices within engineering curriculum, as well as samples of assignments are also presented in this work.