Should You Let AI Write Your Next Cover Letter or Personal Statement? Maybe Not
Writing Center Consultant Corey Addison-Taylor explains the limitations of LLM AI when used to write cover letters and personal statements.
Mar 28, 2025
At some point, every student will need to write a cover letter and/or personal statement. These two forms of writing are applicable across the professional world and academia, and knowing how to write a good one will greatly improve your chances of securing a strong job, a scholarship, or successful admission into a program of study. However, writing cover letters and personal statements is difficult, especially while juggling all the responsibilities and stress of college life. Large Language Model (LLM) AI such as ChatGPT may seem like the perfect solution. After all, giving the AI your resume and the application requirements should produce a strong cover letter/personal statement in no time… right?
How LLM AI works (and Why This is a Problem)
Large language models like ChatGPT work by first taking in massive amounts of data. They use that data to generate content by predicting what word is most likely to appear next in a given sequence. This can be useful for a wide variety of applications. However, because the AI is guessing at how to place words in a sequence based on probability, AI models tend to create writing with certain characteristics. In cover letters/personal statements, these characteristics of AI writing include giving vague claims about skills/abilities, providing little to no detail to support those claims, and being overly reliant on keywords from the application requirements, among others. These characteristics make for a weaker cover letter/personal statement.
What Should a Cover Letter/Personal Statement Do?
Cover letters and personal statements have two main functions: 1) to show that you understand the specific needs and expectations of what you are applying for, and 2) that you, as a unique person, can meet or exceed those needs and expectations. A good way to think about them is to imagine you are competing for the position with another student who has the exact same resume as you do. Each of your resumes TELLS the recipient what your experience is using bullet points and adjectives. The cover letter/personal statement is your opportunity to SHOW that you are the best choice with personal anecdotes and examples explaining HOW you will positively use your experience in the position or opportunity you are applying for. This may seem like something generative AI would be useful to help you with, but AI is general and tends toward the non-specific. Being general and non-specific are two of the worst traits to have in a cover letter/personal statement. AI use could end up hurting your cover letter/personal statement more than it helps.
Solutions
If you have no idea where to start with a cover letter or personal statement, it’s possible that LLM AI can help you get going. But you’ll need to do a lot of revision to make it a document unique to your life and representative of your abilities. You’ll also need to know what makes for a convincing cover letter and personal statement (because LLM AI doesn’t – it only knows what words have previously appeared in what order in thousands of other documents). Cover letters and personal statements are also different documents, with different requirements. You can find many excellent resources to help you learn the rules online. These resources even include discipline-specific information that can help you tailor your cover letter/personal statement to your unique context. The Writing Center has several instructional handouts on writing cover letters and personal statements as well as examples to model from. And, if you need more help, the Writing Center is free for all CU Denver students: Our professional tutors love talking about cover letters and personal statements and will help you make your document as strong as it can be.
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