AI in College Essays: Help, Hype and Fading Importance
For stressed students, admissions essay tools powered by AI promise quick drafts, polished prose and fewer late-night rewrites. Surveys suggest more than half of Gen Z use AI weekly, including for help with college applications, while one analysis of 1,000 student essays found 42 percent flagged by an AI detector. At the same time, detection tools are unreliable, and admissions officers know it. Instead of trying to catch every AI-assisted sentence, some universities are quietly downgrading the essay’s role. Duke University, for example, no longer gives numerical ratings to application essays or assumes they show a student’s real writing ability. Teachers are also using AI to generate or refine recommendation letters. For Malaysian applicants hoping to stand out, this shift means polished language alone is less impressive; authentic experiences, clear goals and supporting evidence across the application matter more than a perfectly worded essay.
From Substack to ‘Slop’: The Rise of AI Generated Newsletters
The same technology reshaping admissions is also changing what we read on platforms like Substack. One viral “debate” between Elon Musk and Keanu Reeves that amassed tens of thousands of likes and reposts turned out to be entirely AI generated. Curious about how widespread this is, one writer used Pangram, an AI-detection tool, to analyse the 10 most recent posts from the top 25 Substack Bestsellers in each category. Two-thirds of those newsletters showed no AI usage at all, but the rest told a different story. In Technology, 28 percent of top posts were partially or fully generated by AI. Philosophy and Health newsletters also showed high AI involvement, at 23 percent and 22 percent respectively. Some outlier publications appear to run almost entirely automated, high-volume newsletters, especially in categories like News and World Politics, raising questions about transparency, originality and reader trust.
Where Does Help End and Authorship Begin?
Across college essays and AI generated newsletters, the same ethical puzzle appears: when does acceptable assistance turn into misrepresentation? Many students see no issue with using AI for grammar checks, rephrasing awkward sentences or generating ideas. On Substack, some writers openly use AI as a drafting partner before heavily editing the output. But other cases are more troubling, such as newsletters with 100 percent AI-written posts and little or no human editing, or admissions essays that sound polished yet strangely sterile, full of identical phrasing and vocabulary teenagers rarely use. Tools like Pangram show how a single article can mix human and AI paragraphs in ways readers cannot easily detect. For Malaysian readers and writers, this grey zone matters: if a university, employer or paying subscriber assumes they are evaluating your own work, passing off mostly AI output as fully yours can cross into plagiarism and erode trust.
How Institutions and Platforms Are Responding
Because AI detection is imperfect, responses are shifting from policing tools to reshaping expectations. Some universities are reducing the weight of essays, adding timed writing, or relying more on interviews and school-based assessments that are harder to outsource to AI. Honour codes and application declarations are being updated to mention generative AI explicitly. Platforms such as Substack are under informal pressure from readers and writers to clarify disclosure norms, especially when entire newsletters appear machine-written. Pangram’s Chrome extension reflects one emerging approach: give readers visibility into whether a text is likely AI-shaped, without outright banning the technology. For Malaysian institutions, similar questions loom over scholarship essays, local university applications and even corporate writing tests. The policy challenge is to acknowledge that AI is now normal while still rewarding genuine effort, critical thinking and a recognisable human voice.
Practical AI Writing Ethics for Malaysian Students and Creators
For Malaysians navigating AI in college essays and online publishing, the goal should be honest augmentation, not ghostwriting. Reasonable uses include brainstorming topics, outlining ideas, testing different structures, and running grammar or clarity checks on your own draft. High-risk uses include feeding a prompt like “write my admissions essay” and submitting the result with minimal changes, or launching a newsletter where every paragraph is generated and presented as purely personal commentary. A simple rule: if you would be uncomfortable explaining your AI use to an admissions officer, editor, or subscriber, you are probably over the line. Keep drafts, show your revision process, and be ready to write or speak about the same ideas without AI. When money, grades or opportunities are at stake, clearly crediting AI assistance and ensuring the core thinking and stories are yours protects both your reputation and your readers’ trust.