A pilot study of U.S. college students found that when allowed to use AI while writing, many students treated it as a collaborative aid—using chatbots mainly for brainstorming, revising, and overcoming writer's block rather than generating entire essays. This finding pushes back against fears that access to AI writing tools would lead to wholesale essay generation. The result suggests that at least some students given clear ethical guidelines tend to integrate AI thoughtfully into their work rather than outsourcing writing entirely. However, the evidence is still limited, and these patterns don't necessarily hold across all college students or contexts.