Generative AI is Used as an Emotional Bodyguard
Those essays are written for scholarships or admittance to graduate school, where students clearly are being judged. They are exercises in personal presentation, at least as much as they are exercises in personal discovery.
In the last few years, I've been in a position to read some student essays for scholarships. The effective essay makes me care about the writer as a person, so at the end I'm rooting for their success. Clearly, emotional connection matters in these essays.
A personal essay produced by copying a prompt into a generative AI, by standards of spelling, grammar, vocabulary, and usage, is "better" than what a typical high school senior could write. By the standards of emotional impact and getting me to root for the person, it falls flat entirely.
A writing professor has discovered, however, that her students are not using the generative AI that stupidly. Instead they are using generative AI to outsource the emotional portions of their personal essays. [paywalled]. The professor, a memoir author, is disturbed that the students are avoiding the journey of self-discovery that comes from writing their personal, emotional truths. Instead they are using the AI to provide the pat emotions of hundreds of previously-written texts.
Unlike a diary, however, the personal essay has an audience. Twenty-year-old me had spent a lot of time on emotional discovery, and twenty-year-old me had already experienced enough rejection to have made a conscious choice not to display any of that to an audience.
Twenty-year-old me would have been relieved to be able to put my own essay into a generative AI and ask it to spice it up with emotional insights. Instead of being vulnerable with people who could reject me for having weird or "wrong" insights, I would be able to present the socially approved normal, average emotions that a generative AI would insert.
Lest this starts sounding like an airing of the neuroses of my younger self, approval is key to the for the some of the most important personal essays college students have to write. Those essays are written for scholarships or admittance to graduate school, where students clearly are being judged. They are exercises in personal presentation, at least as much as they are exercises in personal discovery.
Rather than using the generative AI to circumvent emotional examination, perhaps the generative AI is being used to circumvent emotional exposure. As much as I can fault the students for their dishonesty about themselves, I do not assume they are avoiding emotional discovery.
