As is often the case with questions offering a false dichotomy of answer choices, the answer to the trick question, Is it better to use AI on your college applications or not to use it?, the right answer is a snarky yes!
But if not cornered into snarkdom by a presentation of black and white answers amid so many shades of gray, a better answer might look like this:
It is better NOT to use AI at all than to ask a generative AI tool (like, say, Chatgpt or Claude or Gemini) to produce a response to an application question from scratch. Such a request will be tempting and happens thousands of times a day in 2025 because AI tools are all too happy to comply and will cost you only a few nanoseconds and no financial investment. However, as I wrote about at some length in a previous post, I would advise against it if you really want to get in: AI Can Level Up Your Education and Your GPA, but It Won’t Get You into College.
However, it is better TO use AI as a tool to suggest alternative word and phrase choices and to decide which among the choices best captures your original idea than not to use it at all.
Using today’s generative AI as a kind of advanced spell and grammar checker to point out actual mistakes in your writing but also to offer writer’s-choice alternatives can actually both level up your essay and teach you valuable lessons about writing, what Hemingway inimitably called “getting the words right” (see On Writing Well: 3 Tips for Getting the Words Right).
When colleges warn against using AI to write your college essays they’re talking about the first, unethical use, i.e., asking AI to generate something from scratch. However, no one can object to the use of AI as a teaching and learning tool, to improve students’ writing skills even as they upgrade their college essays. After all, colleges are making no secret about THEIR use of AI as an evaluative tool:
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?