Many industries have been destabilized since AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney were made accessible to the general public. Freelancers and artists in particular are some of the people that have been …
But aside these, academia has been greatly impacted too. ChatGPT and others like it are basically hacks to limitless information and solutions to almost every question you have within seconds.
photo is mine
Smart people love hacks. However, smart people also know the extent to use hacks to not get into trouble. And that’s what we’ll be talking about in this post.
Most people face a dilemma of whether to use AI to completely write their statement of purpose or personal essays, or to completely write it by their themselves. Of course, the latter will be the best option. However, it’ll be unwise not to take advantage of the existence of AI at all during your application.
To make the best use of AI whiles still staying in a safe zone in writing your grad school essays, it’s best to use AI to enhance, not create. The point of these essays (statement or purpose and personal essays) are to hear YOUR unique stories and assess YOUR writing abilities. So you can already see how using AI to write your essays is actually shooting yourself in the foot.
ChatGPT is generic
You need to remember that multiple people are probably feeding it the same prompt you’re feeding it as well. So what does it do? Most likely generate the same piece of text for both of you. At best, it might put some word variations in there to give it a “unique” feel. Still, admission committees are reading several essays and can easily spot these similarities or patterns across multiple essays.
ChatGPT could be outdated
The free version of ChatGPT that most of us use has it’s information reach ending at 2022. This means that everything it’ll be saying in the essay it writes for you could no longer be applicable today.
For instance, if it should mention that you want to work with professor X, Professor X might’ve left the University after 2022 and ChatGPT wouldn’t know.
photo credit: @ nhaji01
This updated information will be available on the program if you check (which you most likely didn’t do if you’re using chatGPT for your essays). Turning in an assay like this suggests to the admission committee that you either didn’t do your homework on the program or you used AI for the essay.
Should I write my essay entirely myself then?
Well, not really. The keyword is entirely. Employ the assistance of AI, just don’t use it solo to do all the work. This circles back to what I said earlier - use AI to enhance, not create.
I would advise that you craft your essays yourself. This allows you to tell YOUR story and make your essay original. Give examples if possible of some of the things you talk about and (I already said in my previous posts) remember to show, not tell. Once you have your original essay, you can enhance your essay by asking ChatGPT to make your essay more coherent or to correct grammatical errors.
Like every advancement in technology, AI has come to make things easier. However, we should be smart in our use of AI and not abuse it.
I believe admission committees are aware that students in this year’s application cycle and the ones to follow will be using AI to assist them in their writing. Hence, they’ll be on the lookout for AI exclusively written essays.
In my opinion, if your essay sounds original and contains information specific to you, they’ll be lenient if your essay has a bit of similarity to AI-written text. As much as AI detectors can be correctC they still have a signifcant margin of error and the adcoms are aware of this.
