What ChatGPT Means for the College Essay

There has already been at least one article declaring the college admission essay a thing of the past. According to a recent article in the New York Times, ChatGPT is the smartest, funniest, most humanlike chatbox to date. College counselors are wondering if we will become obsolete. Will AI will be writing essays for high school students on everything from how they have made their community a better place to why they wish to attend XXX University? College professors are wondering how they will grade papers that may have been written by AI. Journalists worry that all future news article will be generated by a machine. According to Gary Marcus, emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at NYU, in an interview on the Ezra Klein show,"It's synthesizing a bunch of stuff that humans have actually written already, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse...So everything it produces sounds plausible because it's all derived from things that humans have said...I worry ... any time you ask a machine to do something, if it doesn't really understand who you are, it can misinterpret that request."
So it will be fascinating to see what happens with this new technology. I, for one, hope that students will continue to write their own essays. I see so much growth take place during the application process as students are forced to reflect deeply on who they are and what they want out of life. I would hate to take that away from them.

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