Reply to Chatgpt common app essay blew me away..

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I either don't believe it or you must have sadly low standards for college essay writing.

I'm a writer who works with AI (and has even worked to train AI chatbots before). AI can be an incredibly useful writing tool, but there's no way any of the bots I've used could generate a truly compelling personal essay. A generic essay that checks a bunch of boxes for someone with very mundane standards? Sure. But not something original and truly moving. It's a robot. It doesn't think and has no soul. You can always tell.[/quote]

IMO it can get you 80% there. 20% editing after that![/quote]

PP here. For professional, corporate, writing, I agree.

For personal essays, I think it's the opposite. [b]You need to provide 80%, and AI can improve it that last 20% if you use the AI properly. [/b]

Of course, most personal essays written by students are pretty trite and mediocre. But even those are trite and mediocre in a way that usually reveals the humanity of the person behind it. AI-written essays are trite and mediocre in exactly the way you'd expect a robot trained on an LLM to be. It can even be perfectly structured. A good personal essay will reveal something essential about the writer. An AI chatbot cannot do that. Any revelations will be fake or stolen, and this is generally easy to spot.[/quote]

I think this is the key: for personal essays, the raw material has to come from the student before turning to ChatGPT. Once that substance is in place, there’s no harm in using AI as a writing tool to shape the draft.

College admissions programs should adjust their expectations and recognize AI as a modern tool—much like word processors replaced handwritten essays. We should be encouraging thoughtful, responsible use of AI to improve writing, not treating it as something inherently negative.[/quote]

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