The easy availability of AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which can manufacture humanlike text in response to short prompts, is poised to upend the traditional undergraduate application process at selective colleges - ushering in an era of automated plagiarism or of democratized student access to essay-writing help. Or maybe both.
Rick Clark, executive director of undergraduate admission at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his staff spent weeks this summer pretending to be high school students using artificial intelligence chatbots to fill out college applications. The admissions officers each took on a different high school persona: swim team captain, Eagle Scout, musical theater performer. Then they fed personal details about the fictional students into ChatGPT, prompting the AI chatbot to produce the kind of ex