last week: i found out very suddenly that my job coach, whom i had been working with for about 4 or 5 months prior and had what i felt was a pretty good rapport with, had left the company for another job opportunity and i had a new job coach to work with now

(someone to whom i had been sneakily introduced to under the pretext that i was just, meeting with two job coaches now for some reason, in a meeting i now realized in hindsight was actually a handoff but was not presented to me as such)

and i was kinda sore about how cagey they'd been with that whole situation but that's not the point of this plurk

anyways new job coach (we'll call her A) had been tasked during that meeting with revising my resume to get it under 2 pages (i had been using a resume generated by indeed and it had a lot of cruft based on the weird way that site works)

a couple weeks later A sends me the draft of what she'd come up with

i read it. and. lads,

i am like 90% sure she'd used chatgpt to shorten it

a lot of the sections are like, clearly based on what i'd written before, but now kind of nonsensical and half-baked

in ways that don't seem like human mistakes

i can't like. prove it. but i have the suspicion, and i know that i can't use the resume in its current state anyways

so i just rewrite a bunch of those sections and send her the new revision. i do not accuse her of anything, i just say i was unsure about the wording in some sections so i did some rewriting.

and the good news is that the revised version is under one page! which is a good place for a resume to be in!! so i kinda set it to one side

she lets me know she's going to be looking for job listings to send to me, as my previous job coach did, so i just sort of sit tight and wait for that

fast forward to today. she emails me with some job listings

but she mentions at the start of the email that she'd asked chatgpt for some job titles to search for based on my parameters.

and like.

this is perhaps not as bad of an infraction as the resume was. but it does seem indicative of a pattern that is potentially concerning, i think you'll agree

so like. i had previously convinced myself to not worry about it but now i'm worrying about it again. i give an honest attempt to go through the listings like i did with my previous job coach (whom we'll call "M", let's say).

and the listings she'd found are kind of questionable. a couple gig-worker type companies and some customer service focused stuff, which was supposed to be one of the off-limits things for me. and one of them was even in a location we'd already discussed that i cannot commute to.

but i pick one of them that seems, kind of, almost, fine. and decide i'm gonna think about applying to that one anyway even though it involves customer service.

i reply to her email letting her know what i thought about the listings and what about them wasn't working (which was a thing i did regularly with M, so i sort of thought that was just part of the process).

inhales slowly

and i also let her know that i would prefer not to involve chatgpt or AI in general in this process going forward.

i didn't really go into it, just a firm statement of my preference. because at this point i'm really regretting not having brought it up already previously

she replies rather quickly

so, a couple things coming to light all at once in this reply. first, that there was some sort of benchmark we were supposed to be meeting but weren't. of which i had not been aware previously. and second, that i really am gonna have to get into it on this AI thing after all.

i kind of get into a bit of a panic spiral about it for a while because i'm scared and overwhelmed and not really sure how best to proceed in this situation

but i talk with some friends about it and get some feedback and manage to calm down enough to start drafting a reply, which takes me several hours to do

so like. the evidence suggests that this is a person who has not been educated about the problems and pitfalls of AI. and it sort of seems like my suspicions about the resume had been more or less validated. so if i don't at least make an attempt to explain my own objections, then it's clearly going to keep being a problem.

so eventually i come up with this.

which is. i dunno. i feel weird sitting here didactically explaining to an adult professional the problems with gen AI, but i have kind of been put into a situation where i have to

i am also kind of staking this whole thing on my suspicions about the resume being correct. but logically the odds that it wasn't touched by AI are almost zero at this point, and this conversation isn't gonna continue until i'm honest about where i stand there. so i just kinda gotta eat the odds that i might be wrong

i dunno how she's gonna react to this but i guess i'll find out in the morning ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

this was the article l linked btw

i handled all this probably as best as i could, but my heart is still beating out of my chest about it and i guess i'm just gonna have to live with that

/hugs

if it helps at all after the fact, that last response of yours looks really good to me. clear and to the point, plus softly setting boundaries that can be hard enforced later (e.g. don't blame me for not meeting a quota you did not inform me about, do not rely on genai for information)

but also, that's, stressful,,,,

good news! A has replied saying that she did not use chatgpt on my resume! in fact, she says this was her first time using it!! 🙃

suffice it to say i do not really believe her, but i am willing to let it drop at this stage

"i didn't use chatgpt, i'm just an incompetent editor" is.......
well, here's hoping she improves from here

oof