That is pretty low effort for something that if a little more care went into might turn around your chances.
Am I wrong or does the article feel like it was written by AI?
It is pure slop.
Random assortment of keyword-related sentences, tied together with superficially correct language.
No human would write that thank you notes are “contentious” and “require the applicant to do free work”, while linking to an X post of some dude saying “pro tip: write thank you notes”
Nope, there are a lot of AI tells in the article.
I deal with job applications. It’s incredibly obvious when a CV and cover letter is just AI. There’s no need to even confirm it with software. Everyone bins them straight away.
It’s not so much a surge in using AI on genuine job applications—and honestly, that wouldn’t even be an issue—its the sheer amount of slop spam coming in. They’ll apply for half a dozen jobs with different resumes catered for them, from anything from entry level data analyst to director of marketing, not realising it’s the same company.
Cover letter generators are really good now. You’re noticing the low-effort ones, but the adept users are tweaking and editing before send. If it hasn’t happened already, pretty soon you will not be able to tell the difference.
Thats the same as getting a template and refining it years ago though.
I saw a job app the other day. Caught my eye because it’s offering 1.5-2x what I’m making today. They have a big disclaimer that they use AI to help vet resumes. I’m not applying because I’m happy where I am (and because an undisclosed portion of that pay is performance based), but if I did, I guarantee I’m sending AI slop that knows how to sound like what AI wants to hear.
I have been on both sides of hiring. It’s awful for everyone. It’s like speed dating because you need a partner in two weeks. AI is bullshit. HR is bullshit. Leetcode is bullshit. To a point, even a degree is bullshit — almost all of my coworkers have at least a bachelor’s degree but I’ll bet none of them know I do not — one of the guys who works for me just got his Master’s. The only good test is to sit down with someone and see if they have what you’re looking for.
Every time I’ve gotten to do that, I’ve been hired. But I’ve gone months unemployed because getting that shot can be so difficult — the one place my lack of degree holds me back.
Anyway it’s like Star Wars said — when bullshit rises, more bullshit rises to meet it.
They’ll apply for half a dozen jobs with different resumes catered for them, from anything from entry level data analyst to director of marketing,
That even happened before LLMs. Especially at coveted companies. People just want to get an in and then think they can get the job they actually want once they work at the company.
I refuse to write any sort of cover letter for any job application. It’s a job. I want it for the money. I’m not going to wrote some bullshit about how I’ve always dreamed of working for said company and it’s the perfect role for me. In an ideal world I wouldn’t be working at all.
Just use a generator, they’re cheap and easy and tailored to your resume. DM me for recs, happy to send some ideas or freebie codes
Same here. They can find out what I’m like in a conversation, not an essay.
What if the preliminary reviewer is an AI and it really likes AI written text?
Then it gets deleted
Warning signs for sure. I’m with Meryl Streep here, so many Anne Hathaway’s offering you a job and you can’t personalize a thank you for the opportunity? I’d probably drop what I do and be her personal assistant. Because that would probably be pretty awesome.
I definitely agree about putting in some effort if it’s for something important to you, but that’s probably not how people doing stuff like that think.
They’re all about optimizing their output, with a spammer’s mindset. Who cares about effort, you can have a robot apply for a million things at once and just wait for whatever sticks. They believe they’ve cracked the system. And who knows, maybe most recruiters can’t tell (yet).
Yet another case of slop pollution making every aspect of life worse.
That strategy works if you are applying for a cog in a machine kind of job, it won’t work for a personal assistant to the boss kind of job.
Something is wrong here, LLMs won’t spit out the same word-for-word response for the same prompt that’s not how they work.
It’s probably not the same word for word, but with very similar structures. And LLMs tend to structure the text in very similar ways that don’t feel quite right.
The article said they were the “exact same”.
Some reporters tend to take hyperbole too literally.
It seems a more likely that the candidates were cutting and pasting a standard response, either way my point was to question the integrity of the article, which seems itself to be AI slop anyway.
You are right, but you are also wrong. If they’re given the same seed, they certainly will. They are 100% deterministic. But in reality, the seed is randomly generated, so yeah, it won’t be exactly the same every time.
Even if they had the same seed, they would all need the exact same prompt. The chances of multiple people all independently coming up with the exact same prompt is highly unlikely.
Please read the last sentence of my comment. I am not saying that the interpretation is wrong, I’m saying the statement that that’s not how LLMs work is wrong. That is how LLMs work. They are deterministic. The only reason they don’t do that in practice is because we purposefully seed them with random data to make them not do that.
Where was I wrong? I said nothing that contradicts the detail you added.
LLMs won’t spit out the same word-for-word response for the same prompt
You can give an LLM the same seed and it will spit out the same word-for-word response. That’s how they work. It’s just a bunch of math.
You can give an LLM the same seed and it will spit out the same word-for-word response. That’s how they work. It’s just a bunch of math.
You’re assuming that because I missed out that detail I must be ignorant of it, that’s not very charitable, I could well have been ignorant of it but you could have made your otherwise useful clarification without telling me I was wrong.
You said “that’s not how they work”. But that is how they work. Same prompt = same output. Throw some random data in there to jumble things around and you get a little variance. That’s the seed, and we only need to do that because LLMs are inherently deterministic.
Same reason Minecraft has a random seed for world generation, and block cipher algorithms use an initialization vector and/or feedback loop. We don’t want the same thing every time.
I did say that you’re right, because the tooling we use around the LLM itself does exactly what you’re talking about. So, in practice, you’re right.
Again, you’re telling me what I already know, because you’re still assuming. I can make the point that same prompts don’t produce the same output without explaining about random seeds.
I honestly wasn’t trying to attack you. I think we should be careful when we talk about LLMs, because it’s important for people to know that it’s just a bunch of math in a computer program. A lot of people have a tendency to anthropomorphize it.
So your hyopthesis is that instead of a load of people cutting and pasting the same response (AI generated or otherwise,) they all cut and pasted the exact same prompt into exactly the same model with exactly the same context running on exactly the same hardware, and went to the trouble of also fixing the same seed?
That certainly seems the simpler explanation.
How did you possibly get that from what I said? Are you purposefully being as uncharitable as possible?
No, I clearly was not talking about this situation. I was clarifying how your interpretation was correct, but you were factually incorrect.
Not my interpretation.
And what you were doing was “well, akshuallying”. Own it.
It’s called pedantry, and I have never failed to own it. At this point, I feel like you’re trying to be overly abrasive.
Was it not your interpretation that the messages seem to not be from LLMs, because they’re identical? Because that’s literally what you said.fuck mate, they said as much
