Can I Use ChatGPT for my Application Essays?
by Lillie W.
Sure, the temptation is tantalizing. The touted miracles of generative AI language programs such as ChatGPT or Google Bard might seem fantastically enticing: producing a credible piece of writing that involves barely a lick of your own work, what could be better – right?
If you compulsively barked “Wrong!”, congratulations to you. For this notion in indeed wrong on so many levels — both obvious and not-so-obvious – that you’re better off banishing all ChatGPT impulses for any current writing, for class assignments as well as college application essays.
First – and this should be so obvious that we blush to even bring it up – it’s hands-down, indisputably unethical. Would your conscience permit you to hand in a ghostwritten essay as your own homework? Arguments that ChatGPT does not technically produce plagiarism miss the point. Writing assignments (and college essays) develop your conceptual and linguistic skills together. Skip those lessons at your peril.
But it’s the second downside to such programs that could ultimately doom your college application essays. Where do you think ChatGPT gets its information?
And how will it ever render that information to persuade a picky admissions office that you’re the kind engaging, original, inspired, and motivated personality they want at their elite campus? Someone with passionate interests and genuine emotional commitments is who they’re looking for. They’ll be scouring your essays for signs of individuality, spirit, and authenticity – exactly what a computer-generated text, even a sophisticated one, will not give them.
To have a ghost of a chance of competing with the real you as a persuasive author in this competitive arena, ChatGPT would have to have access to the details of – well, your whole life, including your thoughts, beliefs, motivations, attachments, desires and so on.
This is why, when you consult with an essay mentor such as those at IvyBoost, the first phase is a crucial one: your essay mentor will spend time probing for those special qualities and aspects of your character and intellect that will impress a jaded application reader. Never doubt that those qualities are there! Ferreting them out is something you can do with the right (human) help.
Asking ChatGPT or Google Bard to do so would be futile indeed.
Several other pitfalls to those programs include their occasional conflation of fact and fiction, their difficulties with nuance and context, and their surprising capacity to deceive even their users – all flaws that could sabotage any written work.
Pity the poor New York City lawyer who recently filed ChatGPT-generated research in a lawsuit, only to be stunned when the filing’s “precedents” turned out to be bogus. “I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” he reportedly griped to the judge.