Can I Do Better Than AI: A Comparative Analysis of a Medical Student Essay Created With and Without Generative AI

Background With the increasing integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in education, questions have emerged about their effectiveness in academic tasks such as reviewing literature and writing essays. This paper evaluates whether generative AI could outperform a third-year medical student writing a literature review. Methods A third-year medical student wrote a 3000-word literature review on the prevention of breast cancer following University guidelines. Three prompting methods were used to generate essays with the same title and guidance using 'ChatGPT-4o' (OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA). Each essay was then graded alongside the student's essay by an AI chatbot using the marking scheme provided. The highest-scoring AI essay and the student's essay were critically compared and analysed. They were then tested for similarity to pre-existing literature using Turnitin, a widely used plagiarism detector. Results The student's essay comprised 3044 words, written in 452 minutes. In contrast, the highest-marked AI-generated text comprised 3260 words, written in only 15 minutes. However, despite efficiency in time, the AI-generated essay demonstrated reduced originality, receiving a Turnitin similarity score of 46%, compared to the human-written score of 26%, indicating a greater overlap of content from existing sources. Furthermore, it was found that a single prompt was not sufficient to produce a high-quality, original, AI-generated essay; instead, a large series of instructions was required to produce a suitable review. Conclusions Generative AI can assist students by complementing their efforts, but it produces work that may lack originality. Further research is required to improve AI's ability to generate original, in-depth content.