For physician residency applicants, the personal statement is a vital opportunity to go beyond listing what you have done to give residency programs specific insight into who you are. The final product should reflect your voice, your journey and your passion for medicine.
The task can seem daunting, and there may be some temptation to outsource it to AI programs such as ChatGPT. But taking such shortcuts could end up costing a residency applicant in the long run.
During an education session on preparing for the Match at the 2025 AMA Annual Meeting, three long-time residency program directors delved into the reasons why using AI to write your personal statement is, at best, a risky proposition.
It can lack passion
Uploading your CV into an AI tool and having it construct a personal statement can lead to an impersonal output. And that’s exactly the kind of thing that gets your application packet overlooked.
“If we can cut and paste your paragraph into somebody else’s personal statement, it’s not personal enough,” said Sanjay Desai, MD, the AMA’s chief academic officer.
Dr. Desai warned that many applicants fall into the trap of simply listing accomplishments, making the statement read like a glorified CV. Instead, Dr. Desai said, the residency-application personal statement should focus on how your experiences have shaped you.
“Anyone else can write what they did,” he said. “But what you have learned from it—that’s what makes it interesting to read.”
That kind of self-reflection will be hard to capture with AI.
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AI use may get flagged
Large-language models often reuse phrasing patterns and common sentence structures. Because of that, personal statements written by AI tools may trigger red flags if an application is screened with plagiarism software. If an applicant’s integrity is called into question, they are almost assuredly disqualified from an interview with that program.
“It's so high stakes,” Dr. Desai said. “There is plagiarism software that has been used for a long time, and there are other screens that you can use.
If you use AI to write your personal statement, “I would be very worried it will bring something up that those systems would catch because it's been used elsewhere,” he added.
Experiences taken out of context
A personal statement should highlight a future physician’s most meaningful experiences. Leaving it up to an AI tool to make a determination as to what those are, can open you up for an awkward interview day.
“Anything that you write in your personal statement is fair game for an interview,” said Rini Ratan, MD, an ob-gyn residency program director in New York.
Dr. Desai added that any program director can detail experiences where the interviewer “picked something to talk about during an interview and ... the person’s trying to remember what it is they wrote.”
That moment can make an applicant stand out for precisely the wrong reasons.
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The danger of duplication
If AI writes an eye-popping line for you, there’s no assurance that it won’t also write it for someone else.
“I remember seeing a personal statement—this was years ago before AI—where the last line was very distinctive,” Dr. Ratan said. “And I was struck by it until I read it again in another personal statement. So even at that point, there must have been a service somewhere where somebody else could write your personal statement for you. So, I wouldn't be surprised if you start to see similarities in the way ChatGPT produces personal statements.”
You lose authenticity
When you rely on AI to generate or rewrite your personal statement, you are at risk creating something that is perhaps more polished but disconnected from who you are.
“Your personal statement should be personal,” said John Andrews, MD, the AMA’s vice president of graduate medical education innovations. “You're introducing yourself. This should be a program's way of understanding who you are. To the degree that you use AI, it distances it from the personal. And that’s ill-advised.
Dr. Andrews’ recommendation “would be to write the personal statement from yourself, from your heart, and not to employ the use of tools that might change the voice or the content in some way that you'll later find yourself accountable for in an uncomfortable situation.”
And, by the way, ChatGPT agrees.
“The process of writing a personal statement is, in itself, a valuable exercise in professional development,” ChatGPT 4.0 said in response to a prompt. “It forces applicants to articulate their goals, reassess their experiences and clarify their reasons for pursuing a specialty. Outsourcing this process undermines that introspection and can leave the applicant ill-prepared for interviews.”
