Gregory's ServerAfter reviewing my ~100th GPT-generated cover letter I am ready to write an essay on the literary style of the GPT cover letter.
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@mewo2 I highly recommend going to ChatGPT and prompting it with "Write me a cover letter for a [job title] job at [specifically name your company, maybe with a brief description of what they do]. It came back with a variant of what I'm seeing from everyone  @bhawthorne @mewo2 I prompted "Write a cover letter to a journalism and technology nonprofit called Meedan. It is for a Frontend Engineer job."  @darius @bhawthorne @mewo2 and of course the people who are doing this never stop to think that you can have chatGPT write a letter too for comparison. You could even have a script that compares incoming letters with the chatGPT sample. Compute the Hamming distance…    @mx There are many I could point out, but here's one that's top of mind: there is a lot of US high-school English class five-paragraph-essay structure. Usually the second- or third-to-last paragraphs begin with a classic transition like "Moreover, ____" "Furthermore, ____" "On the other hand, ____" "Simultaneously, ____" Of course no one thing is a tell, it's the overall "smell" of the thing, lots of little points that add up and a complete lack of any and all personality. @mx The thing is that there are humans who write like this! But in previous years it was not 95 out of 100 cover letters that looked like this, more like 15 out of 100 @darius Ugh. That sounds miserable. Have you sorted them into piles for ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama? They have pretty distinct styles. @adam I don't know about Llama. Claude tends to make shit up, like asserting things about the company I work for and the job I do. GPT keeps things more vague. I think the vast majority of the cover letters I see are GPT-derived  @darius Oof. Tempted to send this to my friend who told me she's using ChatGPT for cover letters, but I'd feel mean. Job applications suck. @misc I think it can be a good starting place to customize from, really not much different than googling "cover letter examples" and starting from there. @misc but also no one takes care to edit the content so that it's in their own voice rather than soulless robot voice?? it's wild to me that nobody thinks "would I ever write this way" @misc but yeah a big problem is the "advantage" of GPT is it does attempt to customize the letter to the company, but then it gets subtle details about the company and what it does wrong! but not in a way someone would really notice unless they paid close attention @darius I suspect that for some people the whole process is just so cringey that they want to get it as far away from themselves as possible and not look back. And for other people, they’re just hella lazy and don’t give a shit. @misc yeah. I'm wondering if we should just remove the cover letter field from our application. it's basically useless now  
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@fifilamoura @misc yeah, I get that it's kinda automation all the way down for a lot of positions. I think it's interesting that people assume small companies automate a ton @darius Next up, job applicants using ChatGPT to guide their answers to remote interviews.   @darius wow, that must be exhausting. o_o (do you interview the chatGPT people or bin them lol) I find it intriguing and frustrating at the same time, thinking about anything "AI" related  |
@darius I just put out an ad for a producer job and I am awaiting these with horror and trepidation