Am I wrong or does the article feel like it was written by AI?
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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Nope, there are a lot of AI tells in the article.
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"
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.