Month of the Dead Internet: Ai Interviewer

after ranting last weekend about dead internet theory i spent this week working on finding some steady remote work and found myself repeatedly bumping up against AI. on monday, tuesday, and wednesday i spent my mornings working on job applications and pumping out cover letters, writing four of them each day from scratch, each tailored to the job description and showcasing a slightly different version of my relevant experience. this sounds like just the sort of thing that someone might outsource to AI, and i was curious how my work stacked up, so i ran my writing through a couple of AI writing detectors to see if i came off as genuinely human and discovered that every letter came back 100% human written, which of course it was, but for some reason that was a little disappointing. i was kind of hoping that i would at least have picked some robotic cadence living in this LLM immersed world of ours.

by wednesday and thursday i had landed a couple of online job interviews. in the first one i was given a set of questions and a time limit in which to record a short series of video responses. the second interview was very similar except this time the questions were being asked by a voice only chat bot that dynamically asked follow ups to my answers. on thursday i had an interview for a third job and this time it was a fully life-like, rendered, animated, and lip-synched AI avatar that conducted the online interview in a way that could almost have been mistaken for that of a real human.

it introduced itself as ‘Sam’ and we had a fifteen minute conversation where we discussed troubleshooting network connectivity, using SolarWinds network monitoring platform, and implementing information technology infrastructure library framework. it expressed enthusiasm for my more complete answers, asked follow ups when it wanted me to expand upon topics, expressed appreciation for my candor when i admitted i was unfamiliar with a particular software package, thanked me for my time, and let me know that ’they’ would be in touch…