Nurturing Complacency and Trampling Creativity: The Shortcomings of AI-driven College Essays

AI is an elephant growing so rapidly that it’s threatening to take over the room—especially in the realm of college essays. In theory, its offer is all too tempting: a crisp, polished, grammatically sound essay draft produced in an instant, allowing students to bypass the trouble of providing meaningful self-reflection and personal insights. But is that really the case? I’m not convinced.

While many are wary of AI and its steadily improving textual faculties, personally, I don’t fear its ability to replace the human writer; I fear what will happen to students who mistakenly believe that it can. While AI-generated essays can certainly look clean on the surface, the content AI produces is only as good as the prompts it’s fed. Any narrative potential outside of the information you explicitly provide is beyond the AI’s reach—unlike genuinely human-driven content, which can always evolve to take on new meanings as the writer’s creative and inspirational impulses grow. To better illustrate what I’m trying to say, let’s look at the example below:

"I was never a fan of lemonade. No matter how much sugar I added, the lemons’ tart, face-puckering bite always lingered on my tongue. Yet, on any given summer day, there was always a lemonade stand somewhere in my neighborhood. Whether by the age-old verbiage or the thought of turning sour into sweet, lemonade had become the gold standard for a summer refreshment.

Even at the age of six, I strove to nurture my vision of change. Innovating the lemonade stand, I set up shop a few days later, ready to compete against the local citrus monopoly. Instead of limiting my offerings to a single drink-type, I offered a broad variety of confections, from cotton candy and snow cones to homemade cookies and fresh juices. I was ready to turn the notion of the stereotypical lemonade stand on its head."

These are the opening paragraphs from the Common App personal statement of a past student of ours who ultimately earned an Early Decision spot at one of the top five business programs in the U.S., a couple years before AI LLMs made their widespread debut. Without reading the rest of the essay, one might immediately think that her narrative focused on her entrepreneurial endeavors at a young age when she first revolutionized the idea of a traditional lemonade stand in her neighborhood. Presumably, this student was highlighting her innovative thinking and early business acumen, demonstrating her natural ability to devise creative solutions outside the norm. While the essay she wrote certainly does reflect those takeaways, that was far from the ultimate message she was sharing. In an unexpected yet resonating twist, this student managed to transform the image of her sweets stand into a symbol for rescue dog advocacy, carefully intertwining accounts of the marketing she did for the stand with a narrative about the brands she helped develop for local dog rescues through photography. It wasn’t merely the story of a childhood sweets stand, but the significance she instilled in it through meaningful connections to her other passions that resulted in an essay worthy of one of the top business programs in the country.

On its own, AI is incapable of extrapolating such a significant, surprising connection from an isolated idea like a sweets stand. It can only follow its prompt, generating a polished yet generic template focused solely and superficially on a single topic. Even were a student to feed AI layers of information through multiple prompts, the result would lack any personal significance and thus ultimately fall flat in an admissions office. The connections would appear strange and forced, because AI can’t actually understand why the connections should be there in the first place. Though AI can imitate the outer workings of a final product, it can never hope to replicate the steps that lead to its genuine creation.

Some of the most powerful narratives our students produce emerge from the most unassuming ideas—ideas many students are initially ready to dismiss without another thought. As a counselor and writing coach, I’ve found that true inspiration arises from the shared experience of multiple minds working together, using creativity that compounds with each exchanged suggestion, turning those modest ideas into striking webs of meaning imbued throughout with personal significance and unique voices. Stories born of the human spirit stretch far beyond the scope of an AI’s algorithms. A unicycle representing one student’s resolve to overcome the daily struggles of her life. A leftover pizza demonstrating another student’s engineering prowess. A different student’s synesthesia embodying his desire to foster interpersonal connections through entrepreneurship. Narratives found in the most surprising places, yet capturing each student’s passions and identity like no other words possibly could.

AI might be able to draw from a database of the entire English language, but authentic human experiences like these will never be a part of its vocabulary.