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Comment by polygamous_bat | Hacker News Reader

My partner is looking for a new job, and ChatGPT has been an amazing help in writing the cover letters that recruiters can't stop asking for. Previously, she would spend hours molding her previous cover letter to the job description. Now she can just give the job description and a bullet point list of her relevant experiences, and spend 15 minutes on the ChatGPT output to polish it a little bit and correct any potential misstatements.

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You realize if this becomes the norm cover letters will simply be made meaningless. One could argue they already are.

Win-win!

As they should be! I do not know why they are not already, but as I said recruiters can't seem to stop asking for them. But be assured that I won't mourn them once they are gone, and if ChatGPT gets us there faster then I am grateful for it.

Edit: on second thought, I believe "Editing ChatGPT output" might be a valuable job skill in the future, and maybe a good cover letter would give recruiters some signals in that way.

Cover letters already are meaningless.

I tried using chatGPT to write me a cover letter and targeted resume given my full resume and the job description. It gave me the cover letter and the resume - but it made stuff up to match the job description. I have a masters degree but it gave me a PhD, for example (I'm not sure why it did this as the job requirements were Masters of PhD, I guess it figured a PhD was better). I'm pretty sure I would have easily gotten an interview for the position based on that cover letter + resume as it was essentially a perfect fit to the job description, but the interview would've gone badly.

That's why the 15 minute review process afterwards, at least for a cover letter the factual errors are glaring enough that they can be caught easily, and simple enough that they can be edited out in that time. It's not at the stage where I can write my partner a job application bot that scrapes job boards and fires off 50,000 applications per second, but the productivity gain is obvious.

This to me is what I see want to see as the fallacy in the anti-ChatGPT argument, but at the same time have to acknowledge as the real danger. I think AI paired with a human, as you are describing, can be more effective and efficient than either on their own. However, I've never seen it stay that way in commercial applications. So I'm afraid that the smallest drive towards cost-cutting will lead to removal of the human in the loop or at least tighten throughout expectations so much that the human intervention is in practice more often missing than not.

Not sure what to do about this. I want ChatGPT as a tool available to me, but I don't want any service provider I interact with to use it because I know they'll fuck it up eventually and I'll get worse service.

> I want ChatGPT as a tool available to me, but I don't want any service provider I interact with to use it because I know they'll fuck it up eventually and I'll get worse service.

This is just straightforward selfishness and narcissism.

No software developer should be so naive to assume they'll always do the right thing with a powerful but incomprehensibly dangerous tool.

I meant for private usage, not as a tool I'd use for business automation

Sure, until eventually you'll fuck it up and get worse results.

You know how many minutes I "spend molding [my] previous cover letter to the job description"? 15 minutes. If you spend more than that, you are clearly doing it wrong.

This is actually a perfect use-case IMHO.

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