The LLM examples for "Water" surely put it in the top 10% of people (let's say, of adult native English speakers who are literate by UNESCO standards). The average person can't string two written sentences together, never mind write a coherent essay "from an opinionated, individual point of view" in a single draft.

That might still make it the worst candidate in the All Souls exams, because those obviously select for people who are interested in writing essays of this sort.

But I'm also curious whether the LLM could compete given a suitable prompt. If it was told to write an idiosyncratic, opinionated essay, and perhaps given a suitable source material - "you are Harry Potter" but someone less well known but still with a million words of backstory - couldn't it do it? The chat bots we have today are bland because we value blandness. Customers are willing to pay for the inoffensive corporate style that can replace 90% of their employees at writing. Nobody is paying billions of dollars for a Montaigne or a Swift or even a Paul Graham to produce original essays.