I found the headline a little confusing. Apparently as producer or director she interviewed actors for a role, and received AI-written thank-you notes thanking her for the interviews.
Companies: Do use ai for everything always or you will be fired
Someone: makes job application using ai
company: not like that
I’ve interviewed people and gotten thank you emails from them, and they’ve never factored into a hiring decision.
I’ve never gotten a job for which I sent a thank you letter. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I think it may come across as desperate.
Anne Hathaway is an idiot trying to stay relevant to other idiots.
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”
AI criticizing AI, poetic, if you ask me.
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.
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.
Have I gone my whole life doing cover letters “wrong”? I use them as an opportunity to talk about things I’ve worked on as it relates to the responsibilities of the job that a resume wouldn’t necessarily explain in depth. I’ve never treated it like I’m meant to ingratiate myself to anpotential employer for the chance. Usually the resume is “Here’s where I’ve worked and my roles there” and the cover letter is “Here’s what I’ve worked on and how that experience is relevant”
I hire for our company and a cover letter is definitely helpful in choosing who to interview since a resume doesn’t always give a lot of useful information that helps us.
I don’t care about your intentions for working, of course it’s money or experience or whatever.
But things like hobbies, travel experiences, location and relocation opportunities, etc all have a factor on if I choose to interview them and often a lot of that doesn’t get included in resumes.
That you are clearly not doing it for the money. If money was your incentive, you could invest half an hour in a cover letter, that doubles as basic research for a possible interview.
Sure, selling stuff at the super market does not need an cl, but many other position expect you to do ‘basic’ research.
Why would I want to research every random company I’m applying to work for? There is absolutely no job on the planet that I’d actually enjoy doing so why would I pretend for the sake of an interview? I have skills that employers need and employers have salaries that I need. It’s as simply as that.
But is it worth it when you have to shotgun applications in order to get maybe two interviews?
If I have to spend a half an hour writing a unique cover letter for each and every job I can apply for maybe 16 jobs a day. That’s peanuts in today’s job market.
The whole concept of a cover letter seems ridiculous. Never wrote one either.
I’m the same. I still read the opening sentences of them, but if it’s the usual “cover letter template” shit, it’s pointless and I go straight to the CV.
We’ve hired plenty of people with lacking CVs that had genuine cover letters, though. It’s clear when someone is trying to say they’re really into their shit, but all they got on the CV is McDonald’s.
But as you become more advanced in your field, they’re useless. At the end of the day, you don’t want to be stuck working for someone that ignores all the skill and experience, declining an interview because no cover letter.
Same here. They can find out what I’m like in a conversation, not an essay.
Its essentially expanding on the bulletpoints in your CV. Annoying but not the end of the world. I hate sites that want it reinput in specific formats for no good reason
Especially when the job is just some generic office job that you can get elsewhere. It’s just not worth my time filling those in, I could have applied for 10 jobs in that time that just require me to upload my CV.
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
That’s a wild thing to say in a thread about how AI slot isn’t appreciated.
Fair, but the people getting the jobs are going to be the ones who use the advantages. The way of the world now
Will literally talking about how recruiters don’t like AI written cover letters.
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.
I’ve seen AI generated resumes citing experience directly copied from the job posting. As in the ‘applicant’ says they have X years of experience working on the exact team they are applying for.
It was honestly so stupid it became kind of funny, at least the first time…
Yeah, that’s the usual. It just regurgitated the job description and none of the experience matches up.
Had one linking two years as a florist to advance skills in SQL databases and project leading. Look, it could be true, but there’s dozens of applicants with resumes with data science qualifications or over a half decade experience, so the florist won’t be winning if all they say is what the ad said.
I imagine if any of them get an interview, it’s sorted out within seconds. “So, we’re hiring a mechanic. We’re an auto shop. You seem to be someone that owns a car and that’s the extent of 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.
What if the preliminary reviewer is an AI and it really likes AI written text?
Then it gets deleted
Then you don’t want to work there and they deserve what they get.
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.
Is it? The ones today use your resume as context, then retain the paper trail to ensure you have the full context for the interview. At one point I was able to send like one a minute, and they were of a high quality. Enough that I got a few interviews
It’s an Anne Hatha-filter…
That is pretty low effort for something that if a little more care went into might turn around your chances.
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.
Or, more likely, that the article was generated to target hot keywords and is completely made up.
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
