ChatGPT. Now GPT-4, no longer merely 3. This young chatbot was brought to life by OpenAI in November 2022, to become the fastest-growing app of all time!
There are good reasons for its epic rise to fame. ChatGPT (then GPT-3) stunned the world with its seemingly superhuman responses to written prompts. It’s no surprise that students flocked to ChatGPT, homework in hand, while teachers tried frantically to outsmart it.
It’s a thrilling time to be alive!
The college essay has not escaped the preternatural cursor of ChatGPT. It can return 650 words in just as many milliseconds. It can riff on any topic you can imagine. Write a haiku about a quiet forest? No problem. Decide what’s for dinner from an obscure set of ingredients? Incroyable! The possibilities are endless…
A word to the wise: There’s an inescapable downside. ChatGPT cannot be you. It relies on the text it is given, and on the quality of the prompts you provide, to be anything at all.
We know what admission officers want to see in your writing. So, here are 3 reasons why ChatGPT cannot write your college essay.
ChatGPT cannot write your essay because…
1. It cannot embody your unique voice and personalityLet’s dive in.
That essay you’re working on… How would a reader know it was written by a human, not an AI? Is your writing original enough to qualify as uniquely human?
ChatGPT uses pattern recognition, probability and prediction to push out prose. It draws on massive amounts of text data from across the Internet. It detects patterns, dances with percentages, then delivers its prediction for the next word in a sequence. It does all of this at lightning speed!
Unlike AI-writing, you have a unique writing style, tone, vocabulary, and sentence structure. These features are like fingerprints. Think of them as pixels of your personality on the page. When you sit down to write, the way you string together words is a form of self-expression. The words you choose become a vessel for your voice. This is a quality that no AI can capture.
As impressive as ChatGPT’s language abilities might be, it simply cannot embody your unique voice and personality. Only you can write as you.
How do you do this?
Here’s a snippet from “Time to Spin the Wheel” by Romila to show these tips in action. Romila got accepted into Johns Hopkins University.
“I never thought that Honors English and Biology had much in common. Imagine my surprise one night as a freshman as I was nonchalantly flipping through a science textbook. I came upon fascinating new terms: adiabatic, axiom, cotyledon, phalanges…and I couldn’t help but wonder why these non-literary, seemingly random words were drawing me in. These words had sharp syllables, were challenging to enunciate, and didn’t possess any particularly abstract meaning.
I was flummoxed, but curious…I kept reading.
“Air in engine quickly compressing…”
“Incontestable mathematical truth…”
“Fledgling leaf in an angiosperm…”
“Ossified bones of fingers and toes…
…and then it hit me.”
Romila starts with a surprising connection between language and biology. She draws us into her curious world of words. In the first paragraph, the sentences are longer. In the second, we race through textbook one-liners. It’s unpredictable, but we get to see her personality take shape on the page.
What’s it like to be you? What life experiences have you had that are uniquely yours?
The world’s population hit 8 billion only 2 weeks before ChatGPT was born. Sure, you have plenty in common with some of Earth’s people. But no-one else on the planet lives at the intersection of your ideas, interests, and interactions with the world. No-one else shares your imagination. There is a subtle nuance to your life that no-one can replicate. Certainly not a chatbot!
ChatGPT might have learned trillions of lessons about language but it has no understanding of your life. Zero. It can pick apart words and generate generic descriptions, but it gets nowhere near genuine emotion. That’s yours to feel as you process your life in real time.
As colossal as ChatGPT’s computing power might be, only you can express the subtle nuances of your lived experience.
How do you do this?
Back to Romila…
“I was an avid reader early on, devouring book after book. From the Magic Treehouse series to the too real 1984, the distressing The Bell Jar, and Tagore’s quaint short stories, I accumulated an ocean of new words, some real (epitome, effervescence, apricity), and others fully fictitious (doubleplusgood), and collected all my favorites in a little journal, my Panoply of Words.
“Add the fact that I was raised in a Bengali household and studied Spanish in high school for four years, and I was able to add other exotic words. Sinfin, zanahoria, katukutu, and churanto soon took their rightful places alongside my English favorites.”
Loads of people read. Very few assemble a “Panoply of Words” in multiple languages. Plenty of students study Spanish in high school. How many were raised in a Bengali household? Romila found the unique intersection of her ideas, interests and interactions with the world to write something only she could have written.
Introspection is a key to personal growth. It's a path of self-discovery. It’s the ability to notice connections between our external experiences and internal world. Can you think of moments in your life that have shaped who you are today?
Honest self-reflection is unique to human writing. Admissions experts agree that showing what you learned or how you changed is the most important part of your college essay. This type of insight is far beyond the reach of ChatGPT’s intelligence.
Writing is thinking. It’s a way to explore your internal world. Writing shows your awareness of self in relation to the world around you. As you share a specific aspect of your lived experience, you can reflect on how your interactions with people, places, ideologies and ideas have changed you.
The blank page isn’t something to be afraid of. Think of it as a blank canvas. It’s an opportunity to paint a picture of the person you’ve been, the person you are today and the person you hope to become.
How do you do this?
One last snippet from Romila…
“For all my interest in STEM classes, I never fully embraced the beauty of technical language, that words have the power to simultaneously communicate infinite ideas and sensations AND intricate relationships and complex processes.
Perhaps that’s why my love of words has led me to a calling in science, an opportunity to better understand the parts that allow the world to function. At day’s end, it’s language that is perhaps the most important tool in scientific education, enabling us all to communicate new findings in a comprehensible manner, whether it be focused on minute atoms or vast galaxies.
It’s equal parts humbling and enthralling to think that I, Romila, might still have something to add to that scientific glossary, a little permutation of my own that may transcend some aspect of human understanding.”
Again, Romila connects her love of words with her love of science. She gives us insight into the impact she wants to have on the world. Her writing is honest, reflective and hopeful. And, she lets us in on a secret: the person she aspires to someday become. This is human writing.
John Warner, author and columnist at the Chicago Tribune, writes:
“The bot reveals the difference between human- and AI-writing. ChatGPT is a syntax-assembly machine. It goes word by word, predicting what’s most likely to come next. It does not think, create, or synthesize. It regurgitates. When humans write, we are engaging in a fully embodied process that taps into our full selves — both our rational and emotional parts — allowing us to put new, interesting, and actionable ideas into the world. We create.”
So, to recap… Here’s what you’ve learned.
ChatGPT cannot write your essay because…
1. It cannot embody your unique voice and personalityChatGPT cannot write your college essay because ChatGPT cannot be human. Even more than that… it cannot be you.
In the brave new world of AI-writing, only you can write as you. Start by finding the intersection of your ideas, interests, and life experiences. Explore this space through your writing. Tap into your full self. Then, what you create will be new and interesting. It will be real and uniquely you. Don’t settle for anything less.