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In an examination of thousands of human-written college admissions essays and those generated by AI, researchers found that the AI-generated essays are most similar to essays authored by students who are males, with higher socioeconomic status and higher levels of social privilege. The AI-generated writing is also less varied than that written by humans.

"We wanted to find out what these patterns that we see in human-written essays look like in a ChatGPT world," said AJ Alvero, assistant research professor in the Department of Information Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. "If there is the strong connection with human writing and identity, how does that compare in AI-written essays?"

Rene Kizilcec, associate professor of information science in Cornell Bowers CIS is a co-author of "Large Language Models, Social Demography, and Hegemony: Comparing Authorship in Human and Synthetic Text," published Sept. 27 in the Journal of Big Data.

This research stemmed from Alvero's dissertation work at Stanford University. Part of his research involved an analysis of approximately 800,000 college admission essays written from 2015–17 by prospective students in the University of California system.

"We consistently found that there was a strong connection between the profiles of the applicants—their test scores, their demographic information, even the high schools they were applying from—and their admissions essays," Alvero said. "The relationship was so strong that we were consistently able to predict an applicant's SAT score, within about 120 points."

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