Have you ever wished there were some magical way to make essays write themselves? How much easier life would become if only there were something like this!
If you have, then your dream has come true – the Internet offers us a number of so-called essay generators which do precisely what it says on the tin – they generate more or less legitimately looking essays based on your requirements.
Of course, the humankind is still very far from creating a viable artificial intelligence (and nothing short of it is by definition capable of actually writing a meaningful piece of original text), which means that the quality of these essays leaves much to be desired. In fact, it is pretty hard to say what it the purpose of creating a piece of software like this – they have no practical use, except for a bit of entertainment now and then.
No matter how sad it is, the truth is – it is not a very good idea to try submitting an essay created by such generator to your teacher or tutor unless you want to check if he or she actually reads anything before giving marks. Although these programs differ in complexity and quality of results, generally they may only pass for normal, meaningful text only if you don’t read but skim through it. If you pay any attention to the internal logic of the text, the absence of meaning becomes obvious almost immediately.
Ironically, it is much more difficult to create a piece of software that would generate a high school-level essay that would make sense than a program to create complex pseudoscientific texts. There is, for example, such thing as SCIgen – a program created by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to generate scientifically-looking nonsense. One of its creations, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy even managed to get through to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics despite making no slightest bit of sense.
However, while pseudoscientific gibberish can confuse reader because he is likely to believe that he doesn’t understand anything due to his own limited knowledge, this trick, unfortunately, doesn’t work with high school and college level essays. They are not supposed to use a great deal of complex terminology and professional jargon, and when computer cannot resort to confusion, it becomes very easy to distinguish text written by a real person to nonsense generated by an essay generator.
Thus, no matter what is written on the website of the latest essay generator you found, don’t try to pass it for your own work unless you are absolutely sure nobody is going to read it. It seems that students will have to write their own essays for a long, long time after you graduate from college and will be interested in automatically written texts no more – so don’t try to look for anything of this kind now.
However, essay generators may be a good source of amusement, especially the better-written ones. They serve as a very good illustration of the kind of writing students use when they can’t boast of a very good grasp of topic: they are rife with clichés, repetitions, vague expressions, meaningless constructions – in other words, anything that sounds confusing and misleading, anything that may be attributed to literally any topic.
Sometimes one can read several paragraphs of this gibberish before finally understanding that what he deals with is not just a poorly written essay by a terminally bored student, but a text generated by a piece of program code.
It is also a very good approach to evaluation of your own texts. If you feel that your essay may just as well has been written by a machine – you are obviously doing something wrong.
