Everyone’s worried AI is going to make us less human. I’m finding the opposite: AI is forcing me to get more human, because it helps us cut through the drudgery and get to the core of expressing ourselves authentically.
The First Glimpse of What Was Coming
I’ve been an admissions consultant for 10+ years. I still remember in 2016 when a VERY forward-thinking client said he wanted to write a machine learning program to write essay conclusions for him because he was bad at it and so it took up just as much time as writing the rest of his essay. I was intrigued and told him to go for it.
The tech was still in its infancy, so the results weren’t outstanding, but it was the first time I came into contact with how what we now call AI could revolutionize the admissions space. It was incredible to see how a tool could help candidates clarify their messages, and coach them through the areas they felt weakest in.
Fast forward to 2024/2025, and ChatGPT has completely changed how most of us write. Though my brainstorming process with clients hasn’t changed, I now receive much cleaner first drafts that allow us to more effectively hone in on storytelling and what makes the client authentically unique, rather than spending the first several edits trying to understand the writing and cleaning up grammar.
This is truly a revelation.
What AI Exposes Immediately
This year, a client sent me a first draft about learning to lead through failure. It was grammatically perfect and well-organized. By the second paragraph, though, I could tell the story was too vague to be compelling. We didn’t waste three edits cleaning up sentences. We went straight to the hard work: What was the specific failure? What surprised you about what you learned? What would your team say you were like before versus after? How can we use this to show better fit for the school?
When AI handles the surface-level work, it exposes what’s underneath immediately. There’s no such thing as messy writing anymore, so if your story is generic, it shows up in draft one, not draft four. This is incredibly useful, and it’s fundamentally changed the game.
The New Bar
Now that everyone has access to clean writing, the bar for what counts as a strong essay has shifted completely. Polish is expected, so the only thing left that matters is the deeply human stuff AI can’t generate: authenticity, specificity, genuine insight.
This is why I built Coach Ellin, my AI clone that’s essentially my “mind” available for you 24/7 in 31 languages. I didn’t create an agent that writes essays for people, but created a comprehensive tool to help them organize their thinking and understand what schools are looking for so they could get to the real work faster: bringing their unique voice to the table.
Can AI ruin what makes us human? Absolutely. If you let it. But it can also help us wade through the muck so we have more time to focus on showcasing exactly what makes us human, elevating the work we produce to a level we might not be able to achieve on our own. And that is where the magic happens.
P.S. If you want to see how this works in practice, start a free conversation with Coach Ellin. I built this because I genuinely believe it changes how you’ll approach your applications.
