Should you use AI to write your petition cover letter?

This is the question I get asked most. People have ChatGPT open in one tab and a blank Word document in the other, and they want to know if they can just ask for an EB-2 NIW cover letter and be done with it.

My answer: don't let AI write your cover letter. Write it yourself, then use AI to make it better. That difference matters more than it sounds.

Why AI shouldn't write the first draft

It doesn't know your work

Your cover letter is an argument about one specific person: you. What you research, why it matters to the United States, and why you in particular are the right person to keep doing it. An AI model knows none of that. When you give it a few bullet points, it fills the gaps with generic praise like "groundbreaking research" and "pivotal contributions to the field."

Officers read a lot of petitions. A letter full of big adjectives and no specifics doesn't prove anything. What persuades is the boring, concrete stuff: this paper, cited this many times, used by this group, for this purpose. Only you have those details, and you have to be the one who puts them in.

It makes things up, confidently

AI tools are known to invent facts that sound real. The most famous example is Mata v. Avianca (2023). Lawyers in New York filed a brief with case citations that ChatGPT had made up. The cases didn't exist. The judge fined the attorneys $5,000.

Those were trained lawyers, and they still got caught. In a petition, the same problem shows up as a citation count that's slightly off, a journal you never published in, a quote from Matter of Dhanasar that isn't actually in the decision, or a "fact" about your field that nobody can back up. Any one of those can make an officer doubt everything else you wrote.

Your name is on it

When you file a self-petition, you sign it and certify that what's in it is true. "The AI wrote that part" won't help you if a claim turns out to be wrong. Whatever goes into that letter, you need to be able to point to the exhibit that proves it.

Where AI actually helps

Once you have your own draft, AI becomes a good editor. This is how I'd use it:

• Rephrasing a clunky paragraph. Scientists write for other scientists. The officer reading your petition probably isn't one. AI is good at turning dense jargon into plain English without losing the meaning.
• Tightening. Cover letters get long. Ask it to cut a section by a third and see what it drops. You don't have to accept the cut, but it shows you where the padding is.
• Proofreading. Typos, grammar, inconsistent tense, the same exhibit numbered two different ways. Boring to catch by hand, easy for a machine.
• Playing the skeptical reader. Paste in your section on one Dhanasar prong and ask what an officer might question. Use the answer to find weak spots, then fix them with your own evidence.

The prompt makes a big difference. Something like this works well:

Improve the clarity and flow of the paragraph below for a non-scientist reader. Do not add any new facts, numbers, or claims. Do not use words like "groundbreaking" or "pivotal." Keep it about the same length.

The line "do not add any new facts" is the important one. You want the AI working on how you said it, not on what you said.

How I'd do it, step by step

1. Write the whole draft yourself. It can be messy. Get the argument and the evidence down first.
2. Work on one section at a time. Paste it in, ask for clarity and flow with the "no new facts" rule.
3. Compare the new version against yours line by line. Keep what's clearer, reject anything that changed your meaning.
4. Check every number, date, journal name, and citation against your exhibits. Every single one.
5. Read the final letter out loud. If a sentence doesn't sound like you, rewrite it.

One more practical thing: before you paste anything into an AI tool, take out personal identifiers like your A-number, passport number, and date of birth. The tool doesn't need them to fix your grammar.

The bottom line

AI is a decent editor and a bad author. Your petition is the case for your own work, and you're the only one who knows that work well enough to make it. Write it yourself, let AI clean it up, and check everything before you sign.

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Not legal advice. I'm a scientist, not a lawyer, and this post is for educational purposes only.