Ethics of Writing Personal Statements and Letters of Recommendations with Large Language Models

Large language models are becoming ubiquitous in the editing and generation of written content and are actively being explored for their use in medical education. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) engines to generate content in academic spaces is controversial and has been meet with swift responses and guidance from academic journals and publishers regarding the appropriate use or disclosure of use of AI engines in professional writing. To date, there is no guidance to applicants of graduate medical education programs in using AI engines to generate application content-primarily personal statements and letters of recommendation. In this Perspective, we review perceptions of using AI to generate application content, considerations for the impact of AI in holistic application review, ethical challenges regarding plagiarism, and AI text classifiers. Finally, included are recommendations to the graduate medical education community to provide guidance on use of AI engines in applications to maintain the integrity of the application process in graduate medical education.