The Foreign Service Journal, June 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2023 53 Francesca Huemer Kelly, the spouse of a retired Foreign Service officer and ambassador, counsels students on their college application essays through www.essayadvantage.net . A freelance writer, co- founder of Tales from a Small Planet, and former editor of AFSA News, she has also served as a college counselor at two international schools. EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT New technologies based on artificial intelligence are raising lots of questions for students and educators alike. BY FRANCESCA KE L LY Generative AI and the College Admissions Process I stood outside the window, staring at my reflection in the glass. My brother’s face was just inches away on the other side, but it was like he was a million miles away. He was sitting in a hospital room, surrounded by white walls and beeping machines. It was hard to believe that just a few months ago, we were playing video games and teasing each other like we always did. Now, he was trapped in his own mind, unable to communicate with the outside world. Does that paragraph draw you in and make you want to read more? That’s what I’ve traditionally coached my college applica- tion essay students to do with their writing: open with a “hook.” But the above paragraph wasn’t written by one of my students, or even by a human being. It was the first paragraph of an essay created by the genera- tive artificial intelligence (AI) entity, ChatGPT, after I fed in the following prompt: “Write a 550-word college application essay in narrative form that tells a story about the writer’s experience visiting his schizophrenic brother in a mental hospital. The essay should open with a scene that is compelling, then go back and tell a little family history and the sibling relationship, and finish with insights about what the writer has experienced and what he has learned.” As soon as I submitted this prompt, ChatGPT started writing in front of my eyes. The entire essay was done in less than a minute. Not only that, but the essay was better than serviceable—it probably would have fooled many admissions officers. Unless you’ve been living off the grid, you’re probably aware of the recent buzz about ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI. Artificial intelligence has been around for a while, but since OpenAI made ChatGPT more accessible to the general public last fall, both usage and discussion about it have increased expo- nentially, especially among college counselors, admissions officers, high school teachers and university professors—and students. And that’s just in the world of higher education. The conver- sations have gone far beyond that into AI-generated art, music, literature, inventions, and other applications. The questions range from big (“Is humankind opening Pandora’s Box?”) to small (“Can I use AI to help me write my college application essays?”). In this article, we’ll confine our discussion to the latter topic. Phew .