The Foreign Service Journal, June 2023

62 JUNE 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT work as their own. Meanwhile, some professors are teaching students how to ethically use generative AI to help in their studies and writing. The Positives: How Can Generative AI Help? Despite the concerns cited above, let’s not be too hasty to hold a cross up against the “evil AI monster.” Generative AI can be extremely helpful—in coming up with course syllabi for professors, for example, or narrowing lists of prospec- tive colleges for students. Here are just a few of the ways generative AI can stream- line the college admissions process: Generating an initial college list. This has traditionally been a somewhat tedious process, but generative AI can make it much faster. I asked GPT-4 to find me colleges that offered a major in journalism with a minor in musicology, a four-season environment, and an urban or suburban location. In less than a minute, I had a list of five well-known universities (includ- ing my alma mater, Northwestern), with short descriptions of each—a much more efficient process than using search engines. Planning a college tour. GPT-4 instantaneously produced a three-day itinerary, including approximate drive times, when I fed it the following prompt: “I live in Pittsburgh, and I want to visit the following colleges: Haverford, Gettysburg, Rutgers, Drew, SUNY Binghamton, and Ithaca College. Can you plan an itinerary for me where I visit no more than two col- leges per day?” Preparing for a college interview. Most college websites tend to be clunky, so using generative AI to learn more about a prospective college is a time-saver. It’s to your advantage to have researched spe- cific departments and professors in which you can demonstrate interest (not only during an interview but also in a “Why Us?” essay). Ask generative AI to pinpoint the specific classes, clubs, facilities, activi- ties, and professors that are fine-tuned to your interests. Brainstorming essay topics. AI can find connections between your values, interests, and goals. For example, I asked GPT-4, “What are some connections that can be made between these interests: human anatomy, soccer, and mock trial?” Using both the first response and a second regenerated response, I received connections that included athletic func- tioning of the body, strategic/quick think- ing, teamwork, preparation and discipline, as well as medical malpractice and sports malpractice issues. I added character traits and values and got an even more thorough response. These could serve as a springboard for brainstorming essay content. Outlining. If you’re unsure of how to structure your essay, give generative AI pertinent details and ask it to suggest an outline. Some essay coaches and teachers have already encouraged their students to do this. Correcting/editing original writing. Although applications such as Gram- marly do a good job finding errors in writing, ChatGPT can do even more. I fed it a paragraph filled with spelling, spac- ing, and grammatical errors, and it fixed them all, and made suggestions for new material to include, as well. (Google’s Bard did not do as well; it missed errors and just suggested general ways to improve writing.) My prompt was simply: “Make suggestions on how to improve the following paragraph.” Though I did not use generative AI to write this article, I did ask ChatGPT if parts of the paragraph in which I define generative AI offered an accurate description. The answer was largely yes, with some clarifications, which I then fact-checked and used to revise those sentences. How College Admissions May Change in the Face of Generative AI This is being discussed on practically every high school and college campus right now. Ideas being circulated include reinstating essays as part of an in-person SAT or ACT; using AI detectors; and asking students to create a baseline, hand-written sample in class to a surprise prompt (no electronics allowed) that is then uploaded to the Common App or another appli- cation for colleges to use as a basis for comparison. Administrators are scrambling right now to keep abreast of the rapid changes in generative AI and to come up with poli- cies that are effective and ethical. Will writing coaches turn into “prompt engineers” ? For many of us, this crosses an ethical line, but it also makes us a little sad: We want our students to be not only good writers but also good thinkers. How will generative AI affect our critical think- ing skills? Are we equipped to fact-check generative AI, just as we should fact-check social media? As of this writing, generative AI is evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to know where it will take us. Consider this: It took Facebook six years to reach one billion monthly users; it took ChatGPT two months. The large, even existential questions about generative AI are daily growing more urgent. But for the smaller ques- tions—such as how to make use of AI ethically and efficiently to help you in the college admissions process—we’ve got some preliminary, exciting, and perhaps scary answers, with more to come. n