Like many families, we spent a lot of time over the holidays playing around with ChatGPT and, I’ve got to admit, it was pretty interesting! It was able to write a pretty compelling bio when given my resume and did an amazing job with “explain dark matter to a third grader.” When asked to plan a foodie tour of Madison, Connecticut, however. the results were just plain innacurate.

Logically, I wondered, could the tool really write a compelling college essay? After many attempts, I concluded that it could not.

ChatGPT is a powerful language model that can generate text on a wide range of topics. However, when it comes to writing a college essay that showcases a student's personality, ChatGPT falls short. There are a few reasons why this is the case.

First, ChatGPT is a machine learning model that is trained on a large dataset of text. While it can generate text that is grammatically correct and semantically coherent, it lacks the ability to truly understand the context and meaning behind the words it generates. This means that it cannot fully capture the nuances of a student's personality and experiences in the way that a human writer can.

Second, ChatGPT is not capable of original thought or creativity. It can only generate text based on patterns and structures that it has seen in its training data. This means that it cannot come up with unique and creative ideas for a college essay.

Third, ChatGPT may not be able to write on certain topics that you want to express. The model is trained on a wide variety of text, but it may not have seen examples of the specific experiences or perspectives that a student wants to share in their essay.

So while ChatGPT is a powerful tool for generating text, it is not well-suited for writing a college essay that showcases what makes a student tick, how they think, or how they see themselves and the world around them. A human writer with the ability to understand context, generate original ideas, and express unique perspectives is a better choice for this task.