Should I use AI to write a school admissions essay?

I used to worry that when an admissions essay had grammatical, punctuation, or spelling errors, a school would think a student hadn’t taken their application seriously. Now I welcome them. I appreciate errors in writing as a sign of personal engagement and care in an essay.

No admissions officer who is reviewing application essays and is putting together a class wants to feel like they’re reading the words prepared by an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT. Not only can it be insulting, it may also break the school’s AI policies, and above all, it’s typically boring! While AI may tell a story logically and seamlessly, the result is often an essay devoid of humanity and soul.