AI essays - holy moly

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop pretending the AI bots can’t produce quality work. Many heads of admission at the most elite colleges say it produces essays in the top 1% if you know how to train the AI.

Funny how everyone on DCUM thinks they are Shakespeare.

I know professional writers who are impressed with what AI can do. It's crazy. This is OT for this forum, but we've all watched a lot of lower skill jobs get automated. We are now about to see the same thing happen for jobs that require a college degree...

What careers are the safest….
Besides CEO

Lawyer. They are the serpents that slither into congress to make laws. The law will be “even though AI is superior at legal arguments it is illegal for AI to practice law.”

Signed … the worst people on earth

[Anonymous]

Fish in a barrel, but here's an example of AI trampling 'voice': https://dweinberger.medium.com/chatgpt-please-improve-the-gettysburg-address-ceb2a8dfc398

[Anonymous]

Whose kid used some form of AI for apps?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When the applicant uses / abuses ChatGPT for the essays and still get rejected, that will be poetic justice.

Also poetic justice…all the nubes claiming this is cheating, having their kids rejected…just for the colleges to expressly allow it within one or two more application cycles.

Name calling doesn't negate that this is cheating. Colleges may treat writing differently in the future (like bring back sat essay), but the current expectation is that the writing is the student's.

Stop denigrating people with integrity to justify cheating. It's a poor excuse and makes you look like a self-serving parasite.

So, if GA Tech is telling me I can use it today to generate ideas, edit my essay, make my essay better, etc…do I now have to somehow write a completely different common app personal statement for other colleges that are silent?

I don't think GT said full edit in the professional editor rewriting sense. They said something akin to using as a thesaurus. People who want to cheat out of writing are just wishful thinking there.
“Your ultimate submission should be your own.” --GT admissions

I have several friends who are tenured faculty, most at name schools acceptable to DCUM.

“Mass panic” is a real understatement as to how liberal arts faculty are reacting to AI essays.

Schools are spending MILLIONS on AI detectors and getting caught using AI to generate content is considered a serious plagiarism offense.

Spell check? Fine. Grammarly? Okay.

ChatGPT is auto failure of the class and possible sanctions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stop pretending the AI bots can’t produce quality work. Many heads of admission at the most elite colleges say it produces essays in the top 1% if you know how to train the AI.

Funny how everyone on DCUM thinks they are Shakespeare.

I know professional writers who are impressed with what AI can do. It's crazy. This is OT for this forum, but we've all watched a lot of lower skill jobs get automated. We are now about to see the same thing happen for jobs that require a college degree...

What careers are the safest….
Besides CEO

Lawyer. They are the serpents that slither into congress to make laws. The law will be “even though AI is superior at legal arguments it is illegal for AI to practice law.”

Signed … the worst people on earth

You need an attorney to sign the final product. AI can replace all of the associates who do the research and writing that creates the product

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I read an article that basically stated that, while the AI generated writing can be good, it's very impersonal.

Also, in the same article, it stated that some of the stuff coming out of there was nonsense.

Someone (more than one?) have posted AI generated stuff on this forum, and it's pretty clear it was AI generated. It was too generic.

+1 it will strip the voice of the student, which is so important in this kind of essay

What's with this voice BS!? I find the concept of underpaid/overworked app. readers sleuthing for a student's voice laughable. Setting that aside, if a student writes the common app essay and the college supplemental essays using Chat GPT, wouldn't those have the same voice (or non-voice) which the college evaluators would assume to be the 'voice' of the kid or do they have magical powers that I'm unaware of?

If you’re not well-read or used to good writing, the idea of “voice” might seem strange. It’s real. Many, many people have shared already in this thread and another that they didn’t think AI-written essays would help a student write a PERSONAL essay.

Think about it. AI isn’t going to have examples or the style (voice) of a genuine kid. The writing it generates is good, but isn’t going to show personality. Why would AOs pick good writing that sounds like a text book over good writing that has some personality?

A lot of schools look at gpa and test scores (even test optional schools). They give the essay very little weight. As long as it’s not bad/absolutely sucks. Vanilla is totally fine. It’s not the difference maker people think it is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I read an article that basically stated that, while the AI generated writing can be good, it's very impersonal.

Also, in the same article, it stated that some of the stuff coming out of there was nonsense.

Someone (more than one?) have posted AI generated stuff on this forum, and it's pretty clear it was AI generated. It was too generic.

+1 it will strip the voice of the student, which is so important in this kind of essay

What's with this voice BS!? I find the concept of underpaid/overworked app. readers sleuthing for a student's voice laughable. Setting that aside, if a student writes the common app essay and the college supplemental essays using Chat GPT, wouldn't those have the same voice (or non-voice) which the college evaluators would assume to be the 'voice' of the kid or do they have magical powers that I'm unaware of?

If you’re not well-read or used to good writing, the idea of “voice” might seem strange. It’s real. Many, many people have shared already in this thread and another that they didn’t think AI-written essays would help a student write a PERSONAL essay.

Think about it. AI isn’t going to have examples or the style (voice) of a genuine kid. The writing it generates is good, but isn’t going to show personality. Why would AOs pick good writing that sounds like a text book over good writing that has some personality?

You can tell AI to write in a certain style, including the style of particular authors. You can also feed it examples and tell it to mimic that style.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Congrats! He just gave the website his work and it will be used/replicated.

But agree with PP that you don’t know good writing if you think these things write in a way that will make someone stand out in admissions.

It probably writes better than 95% of the US college applicants sadly. Reading, writing and math skills have been declining for years. Many HS students cannot write a decent 3 page paper or solve simple algebraic equations which all middle schoolers should be able to do, and which most elementary school age kids are able to do in all OECD countries.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:When the applicant uses / abuses ChatGPT for the essays and still get rejected, that will be poetic justice.

Also poetic justice…all the nubes claiming this is cheating, having their kids rejected…just for the colleges to expressly allow it within one or two more application cycles.

Name calling doesn't negate that this is cheating. Colleges may treat writing differently in the future (like bring back sat essay), but the current expectation is that the writing is the student's.

Stop denigrating people with integrity to justify cheating. It's a poor excuse and makes you look like a self-serving parasite.

So, if GA Tech is telling me I can use it today to generate ideas, edit my essay, make my essay better, etc…do I now have to somehow write a completely different common app personal statement for other colleges that are silent?

I don't think GT said full edit in the professional editor rewriting sense. They said something akin to using as a thesaurus. People who want to cheat out of writing are just wishful thinking there.
“Your ultimate submission should be your own.” --GT admissions

I have several friends who are tenured faculty, most at name schools acceptable to DCUM.

“Mass panic” is a real understatement as to how liberal arts faculty are reacting to AI essays.

Schools are spending MILLIONS on AI detectors and getting caught using AI to generate content is considered a serious plagiarism offense.

Spell check? Fine. Grammarly? Okay.

ChatGPT is auto failure of the class and possible sanctions.

Except that ChatGPT is better at spell/grammar check than Grammarly - without having ChatGPT write or otherwise edit the essay.
So ignorant to throw away, an penalize use of, the entire superior technology.
Still, I'm fine with OP's kid getting the rejection based on AI use.

[Anonymous]

We tried ChatGPT and many of the suggestions here to improve it. Sure, the AI essays were decent, but bad in so many ways. Wrong tone. No specifics. Nothing authentic. Just generic, generalized, blah, blah, blah. So, uninteresting.

These essays are probably fine for a kid who can’t write and is applying to a non-selective school, but there is little to no chance that they’ll work at the most selective schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We tried ChatGPT and many of the suggestions here to improve it. Sure, the AI essays were decent, but bad in so many ways. Wrong tone. No specifics. Nothing authentic. Just generic, generalized, blah, blah, blah. So, uninteresting.

These essays are probably fine for a kid who can’t write and is applying to a non-selective school, but there is little to no chance that they’ll work at the most selective schools.

I assume you are not using the paid version. No surprise the paid version is 10x better than the free version nowadays.

If you know how to train the bot using essays for accepted kids at top schools, it can produce essays that would work at the most selective schools. Stanford admissions ran the test and said it produced essays in the top 1% after it was properly trained.

[Anonymous]

I asked AI to review my sons essay and the AI actually said the essay was great as is and only made some very minor suggestions.

AI is spectacular if you have a paragraph where you want to interject some humor, but what you are coming up with just falls a little short. The suggestions really lead you down a path that you can personalize. It’s simple a skeleton.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I asked AI to review my sons essay and the AI actually said the essay was great as is and only made some very minor suggestions.

AI is spectacular if you have a paragraph where you want to interject some humor, but what you are coming up with just falls a little short. The suggestions really lead you down a path that you can personalize. It’s simple a skeleton.

Yes.

And it helped witg grainstoinv for new para…

[Anonymous]

Brainstorming

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid entered a draft essay into an AI bot.
It’s now amazing.
And then we entered the result into an AI “test”…..and it passed and said 100% human generated.
The AI version really was better than the human version…it was a “why” essay with a lot of personalization.


I’m just shocked.

Certain you don't know good writing...also suspect there is no "kid."

I think the issue is that some AIs are better than others, some are improving and people who know more about AI can get better results out of an AI.

What would be great is if you could put an anonymized, details-changed draft for another essay your kid isn’t using, put it through the same process and show us the results.