Writing college application essays is one of the more difficult and time consuming parts of applying to college. It can be confusing, and writing is often challenging for people. With ChatGPT and generative AI, it has become easier in some ways.
But ChatGPT is not the solution to writing your personal statement! It can be a helpful supplemental tool if used in the right way. But great, authentic essays don’t come out of a generative AI robot.
Here are the reasons why ChatGPT can’t write your college application essay:
- You still have to brainstorm what to write about.
- No real life examples
- You still have to decide which prompt to choose.
Let’s get into it.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a generative AI tool created and run by OpenAI. Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence (AI), which is a computer system’s ability to perform complex tasks like reasoning, making decisions, or solving problems.
In generative AI, the tool can not only predict outcomes, but create new content and data. ChatGPT creates written output based on what someone asks it to do. You can ask ChatGPT to create different things using prompts. Some examples are “Come up with a list of vegetarian dinners for a family of 4 for 5 days” or “Write an out of office email notifying people I am out for 5 days”. ChatGPT can even write entire essays for you.
There are many benefits and risks of using generative AI tools like ChatGPT. You can read more about them here.
Why shouldn’t you use ChatGPT to write essays?
You can do whatever you want, but in my opinion, you shouldn’t use ChatGPT to write your entire personal statement. You can use it for other parts of your essay writing process, which I’ll talk about at the end of the post. But here are the reasons why I say that ChatGPT can’t write your college application essays.
ChatGPT can’t brainstorm what to write about
The first reason why you can’t write your entire personal statement with ChatGPT is because it can’t decide which of your life experiences to write about.
For any essay, you have to decide what exactly you’re going to write about, whether that’s an essay for a class assignment or a college application essay. ChatGPT can’t write your essay because it can’t decide what to write about unless you tell it what to write about. This means that you have to do the reflecting on your past experiences and connect that to the essay prompts (what the application asks you to write about).
Some people will argue that ChatGPT can do this by brainstorming a list of college application essay topics to write about. Sure, but are any of those relevant to your life? If so, how? ChatGPT doesn’t know that and you still have to do that work.
And sure, maybe you can write a really great prompt telling ChatGPT what to write about from your life with specific examples. But guess what? At that point you already basically wrote your essay. Congrats!
Right now, no robot knows all about your life and can recommend what life experience to write about for an essay. GenerativeAI tools like ChatGPT can also sound fake, bland, or robotic. Maybe in the near future they will be better at creating authentic content.
ChatGPT can’t give real life examples
ChatGPT can write really convincing sounding essays, but it can’t read your mind and give concrete life examples!
For example, say you tell ChatGPT to write a 350 word essay about how you demonstrated leadership in a chemistry group project. ChatGPT could come up with imaginary examples to show your leadership, but they’re not real to you. ChatGPT could make broad statements about how you show leadership in class, but not give specific examples to make your response convincing. You’ll just be making baseless claims, which is one of the top mistakes I see in college application essays.
Like I said before, you could write a prompt telling ChatGPT about an experience you had that includes more details. But at that point, you already wrote part of your essay :)
ChatGPT can’t write your college application essays because it can’t read your mind and write concrete examples that support your argument. That’s why its important for you to reflect, brainstorm, and at least write an outline on your own.
ChatGPT can’t decide what prompt to choose
ChatGPT can generate responses to a prompt, but how do you decide what prompt to write? You have to have a specific goal in mind. Since there are often several options for what to write about in an application, you still need to choose that yourself. ChatGPT can’t decide which prompt to respond to for you.
ChatGPT can generate a list of ideas of what to write about, or even suggest which prompt to choose. But ultimately, the decision is up to you. You need to decide what prompt most closely aligns with your life experiences and would lead to the strongest essay.
How ChatGPT can help you write a college application essay
ChatGPT can be helpful for certain parts of writing an essay. It can help you brainstorm topics to write about or help you shorten your draft to fit the word count. It can get you out of writer’s block too. But depending on ChatGPT to write your essay from start to finish is not a good idea in my opinion. It’s just lacking right now. Plus, there’s a lot of work you need to do on your own to get ChatGPT to write a decent essay for you.
Instead of using ChatGPT to write your essay, check out my tips for writing an authentic college application essay that you can feel proud of. I also offer services to help you write an essay you can feel proud of.
Have you used ChatGPT or other AI tools to help you with your application essays?
