I don’t know about you, but my LinkedIn feed is getting awful repetitive lately. As someone with a great deal of experience in recognizing half-baked and completely raw writing (you try teaching college freshman for a decade, and you’ll get there too), I’m starting to see a lot of random ingredients thrown together in the mixing bowl.
To get a delicious final product, you have to start with basic ingredients, bring them together into a cohesive whole, and then bake it to the perfect finish. Instead, what I’m seeing is a lot of ingredients mashed together by an AI, without the finesse or experience indicating a human touch or time in the oven before publishing.
dTake this list, a perfect case study of how not to use AI when writing:
First, how I know it’s AI (because I’m determined to teach you all to see the same patterns I do):
- “Certainly, I’d be happy to.”
- Almost every sentence is the same length and cadence.
- Generalizations, not specifics.
- So. Many. Buzzwords.
On the whole, a quick glance through these first two suggested answers reads very much like a chat with GPT 4, with parameters set only to “most asked questions” or “give me answers as if you’re a candidate”. For funsies, I tried an experiment to see if I got the same kind of results. Here’s my input:
And the answer:
Note the almost identical output–though I don’t have 100k followers to see mine and think I generated it myself.
I’m not going to quibble about the use of “Toughtest” [sic] to describe such basic interview openers as these generic options: it’s definitely tough to talk about yourself and your fit for a position without any specific guidance as to the interviewer’s motivations or interests. I’m also not going to dwell on the title typo that suggests, at the very least, a lack of close revision.
I am going to suggest that if you want to stand out from a candidate pool, perhaps regurgitating unaltered LLM outputs is not the way to go.
Following a model aggregated from common responses is much more likely to make you seem like part of a horde than to seem like part of an individual team. Can the AI output be one of your ingredients? Sure! We all need some recipe guidance, and this is a place to start–but, as always, please don’t just stop there and turn it in.
Something Polished 