Artificial intelligence meets academic writing: Examining ChatGPT’s affordances and limitations in South Africa

Abstract

Many studies have explored the affordances of ChatGPT for English language learning, but these have rarely focused on ChatGPT’s abilities to impart knowledge on the writing of academic essays specifically. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the affordances and limitations of ChatGPT when used to explain features of academic writing and compose academic expository essays in the South African context.  The data was derived from conducting the usability testing activity, where the researcher interacted with the ChatGPT tool to respond to questions guiding this paper. The findings were interpreted through the lens of the critical pedagogy framework. The two dominant findings reveal that, first, there is still a gap between ChatGPT’s listing of facts and its ability to perform the task in accordance with them, but, second, ChatGPT's expository essay would have passed the academic literacy course based on the marking rubric.