What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.'s Effects on Creativity

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/writing-creativity-ai.html

What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity
May 27, 2026
By Rebecca Winthrop

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For the past eight years, the Georgetown University neuroscientist Adam Green has been leading a national research team tracking the range of novel ideas that college-bound high school students present in their application essays, before and after the introduction of ChatGPT. In one study, he and his team examined personal statements from more than 370,000 students, and found that after ChatGPT became available, their essays suddenly used diverse and colorful language, but lacked truly creative ideas. And the linguistic coverup worked; post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more “creative” by human judges, even if the substance of the essays trod familiar territory.

In a separate study, the team found that human-written essays offered up to eight times more new ideas than those produced by A.I.

Another experiment run by a different research team compared short stories written by humans to those written with A.I. assistance. As with the student essays in Dr. Green’s study, A.I.-assisted works had more interesting vocabulary and were rated more enjoyable to read, but the underlying story lines were more homogeneous. Distinctive and offbeat ideas — with surprising characters or unusual settings — are often shunted to the side when A.I. is involved.

For the first time in human history, we have a technology that can generate words separately from the thoughts they represent. When a chatbot writes, it is predicting the next word that is most likely to make a “good” sentence or essay, based on the text it’s been trained on. It can identify sophisticated and creative word patterns independently of whether the underlying ideas represent something new.

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