The 238 Other Papers

Most parents worry their child will get caught using AI. But that's not the real risk.

Every student I've met who writes with AI has the same fear: what if I get caught? It's a totally rational thing to think, especially now, when guidelines surrounding AI use are so uncertain.

But I think that's the wrong fear to have. The most dangerous part about writing with AI is never standing out.

I've read a lot of essays in my life. Tens of thousands, with days when I've read over a thousand. When you approach a hundred essays read, they all tend to blur together. By definition, most people tend to think in similar patterns, and this process is reinforced by an educational system that teaches us to write in formulas (like the 5-paragraph essay). The effect is that most writing looks average, and nothing really stands out.

By design, AI-based writing fuels this feedback loop, because it's built on predictive mechanisms. When that's how the models are trained, is it any wonder that the writing is, well, predictable?

But the other side of that equation is that it's never been easier to stand out from the huge, average crowd.

What AI does well

AI models work by predicting the most likely next word. Over time, this means that writing eventually gets flattened out as LLM engines average their way to a mechanically clean, but predictable sentence. That makes AI great as a research assistant, or brainstorming partner. But it also means that any writing produced by an AI engine is unlikely to stand out.

It's a logical conclusion to reach, but there is actually hard evidence for it now. Researchers gave 300 writers the same AI assistant and measured the results. Each individual story came out slightly more polished. But across the group, the stories became almost 11 percent more similar to one another. Writers got a little better and a lot more alike.

That really captures the essence of what AI does. It can make someone a technically "better" writer, but it also almost always flattens you out and draws you towards the average.

In short, writing with AI will make you technically proficient, but it'll also strip away your unique voice.

The danger of empty words

There are some types of writing where being technically correct is enough. If you're writing instruction manuals, research reports, or detailed analyses, just having structure and clarity without voice and personality is fine.

College applications are an entirely different story.

In college applications, voice and personality is everything. Having strong technical writing skills is the minimum requirement, but nobody gets into their dream school simply by meeting the minimum requirement. Admissions officers are looking for students who have a distinctive voice and perspective, and who will bring that unique viewpoint to enrich the campus community.

Whether or not something is written by AI shouldn't be as much of a consideration as you might assume. AI detectors meant to catch AI writing don't work well, generating significant amounts of false positives. OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, developed its own AI-detection tool which it then shut down due to its "low rate of accuracy". (More on this in the next post).

So, the main worry with AI writing isn't getting caught (though having a massive discrepancy between, say, your TOEFL scores or what your recommenders write about you and your actual writing is never a good thing). Your top concern with writing using AI should be flat words.

A lack of voice.

Defining voice

Voice is hard to define, as a writer. But the best way to think about it is that voice is the sense a reader gets that there's a real person behind the writing, and that person is speaking to them.

Voice comes through unique and unpredictable word choice. It comes from a slightly counterintuitive metaphor that turns out to be completely accurate. It comes from insights that only a person who lived the story they're telling could know.

Voice only comes from an authentic desire to communicate what you're trying to say. It doesn't come from trying to sound impressive. Your goal as a writer should always be to sound like yourself, but elevated. You want to write as the best version of yourself.

That's what we tell our students.

What to do with this

If you work with AI, you don't have to stop. AI can be an excellent brainstorming partner, and it can get you over one of the biggest hurdles people face with writing: the blank page. You can dictate an incomplete idea to AI and have it draft an opening paragraph, which you can use as a springboard to do your own writing. If you're not a native English speaker, sometimes writing in your first language and using AI to translate also allows you to express your ideas with more clarity than you'd manage alone.

What you shouldn't do is have AI generate long form without much input from you. It might sound technically correct, but in any situation where the reader wants to see voice and personality from the author, it will flatten your voice out, and you'll sound like everyone else.

That's how you write something that stands out in a pile of 239 papers.

This is the first post in a short series on writing in the post-AI world. Next: why the detectors punish the wrong students, and what bilingual families especially need to know. If your child has a draft that feels generic, our Post-AI World coaching helps them find the voice that's already in it.