The Foreign Service Journal, June 2023

56 JUNE 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT So, just a few months ago, the consen- sus was that a talented student could still write a more personal essay than what ChatGPT produced and that AI-gener- ated essays, while very good, still lacked specific and unique details that would have made them… well, more human . Then GPT-4 was released. And with that more sophisticated tool, the land- scape is changing once again. I gave it a prompt for an essay about the writer’s love of fossils, and it generated a good— but again, not great—essay. I tweaked the prompt, asking it to mimic sample essays from different sources. Here, it did better. How the prompt is written and tweaked makes a difference, and I’ve seen some essays generated by GPT-4 that use specific colorful details and show insight, vulnerability, and humor. Just as “deep fake” audio, video, and imagery are rapidly improving, so is generative AI’s essay fakery. That said, generative AI can also produce a result that’s too polished, too sophisticated. That might raise red flags among college admissions officers. And, really, they just want to get to know you better: who you are, what your values are, what you’ll bring to campus. Can an AI-generated essay show these things? That’s up for debate, but it’d be pretty ironic if you asked ChatGPT to generate an essay that showcases your honesty. Admissions officers also want to know that you have good writing skills, because you’ll need those at college—where AI- savvy professors might require essays to be written in class by hand. And generative AI can still get things wrong. I tried my earlier prompt, about the mentally ill brother, with the updated GPT-4. Surprisingly, this supposedly more sophisticated genera- tive AI had some glitches: Even though I asked for 550 words, it generated a repetitive and trite 787-word essay. So, it’s not perfect. Yet. So Why Should You Write Your Own Original Essays? Ethics. Whether or not colleges or students consider it plagiarism to use generative AI to write for you, it’s still considered morally wrong to claim to have written something that you didn’t write.