ArticleJMIR medical education2026
Estimating the Prevalence of Generative AI Use in Medical School Application Essays: Cross-Sectional Study.
Article in JMIR medical education, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundGenerative AI tools became widely available to the public in November 2022. The extent to which these tools have been used by medical school applicants during the admissions process is unknown.
objectiveWe aimed to estimate the extent of generative AI use among cohorts of applicants spanning the rollout of these tools.
methodsWe retrospectively analyzed 6000 essays from 2364 applicants submitted to a US medical school in 2021 to 2022 (baseline, before the wide availability of AI) and 2023 to 2024 (test year) to estimate the prevalence of AI use and its relation to other application data. We used GPTZero, a commercially available detection tool, to generate a metric (P
resultsFully human-generated negative controls demonstrated a median P
conclusionsAn AI detection algorithm identified signs of increased use of generative AI in 2023 to 2024 medical school admission applications compared to those in the 2021 to 2022 baseline period, before AI was widely available. AI use did not appear to confer an admissions advantage. Although these results provide information about the applicant pool as a whole, AI detection is imperfect. We do not recommend deploying AI detection for individual applications in live admissions cycles.
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