"Dear Hiring Manager, I read with interest your advertisement for an experienced astronaut. I am particularly interested in the fact that it requires someone with excellent ability to navigate at zero gravity — whilst multitasking and maintaining a positive attitude under pressure.
In my experience as an Uber driver I am able to draw upon my superior navigation skills — whilst maintaining an unlimited scope of small talk in order to ensure a positive environment, whilst simultaneously multi-tasking to ensure I get my passengers to the airport on time – which is a very high pressure environment."
Now this is no slight to Uber drivers, but an example of how far apart some of our applicant’s experience has been to the role advertised.
In many cases their cover letters looked positively engineered for the role, only to look at their CV and realise they had never set foot in a workshop in their lives.
I suspect less than half of applicants actually properly read the job description, instead using SEEK’s new AI writer to craft the perfect cover letter.
Now let’s continue to the increasingly drippy and vitriolic worlds of social media.
I removed Facebook from my phone over Christmas, because what I’d joined to stay in touch with friends and family, had evolved into an influencer shoving content in my face with every scroll, moving further and further away from real content from my friends.
But LinkedIn, which had been held up as the social network for professional networking, information and intelligent debate, also seems to have gone down a slippery slope.
I can totally understand AI being used to help craft a post — but replies as well?
LinkedIn posts never used to be perfect, they had an authentic tone of voice.
It did used to take an inordinate amount of time to post on the fly.
I struggled, agonising and over analysing what I was saying.
So much so it wouldn’t be unusual for me to post a week or two late, or simply miss the occasion altogether.
Now if I chose to use an AI bot, I could whip out an auto generated post every hour.
Are our social media profiles devolving into a conversation between bots, instead of between people?
Can we go back to focusing on quality over quantity.
Prolific posting is not increasing your presence, it’s completely diluting it.
Finally email — I actually use an AI tool for my inbox, it is pretty good.
Filters things into categories and handily writes draft replies if it’s in the "To Respond" category.
It’s learned my tone of voice really well, even able to distinguish between people I’d say "hey" and "cheers, S" to, or "hi" and "regards" — but I’d never just send a reply without customizing it.
What it is super useful for is giving me a point to get started, when I’m staring at the overwhelming number of unread messages with paralysis on where to even start.
So it concerns me now that I’m getting increasingly more impersonal emails from increasingly more people.
Folks who know me really well and will text one sentence to the point, or give me a call and have a quick yarn, then blindside me with a super formal perfectly worded and structured multiple paragraph reply with a superfluous recap of the situation, lots of excellents and phrases like, "I appreciate your thoughts", "further to", and "in summary".
It makes me feel like I’ve misread our relationship, puts me on guard.
Because let’s be honest, things get so busy that when you’re emailing with regular contacts, you’re usually in such a rush you skip the formalities and run with one line replies.
It’s like AI has turned our emails into small talk at a party.
I’m allergic to small talk, it makes me anxious.
I think we need to change tack on where AI is headed and actually use it to help us think better for ourselves, how to add value, not remove it.
And here’s the irony, it turns out the people who are actually the best at using AI, are the ones who are already masters at their jobs.
Last week Sarah Carney, Microsoft ANZ chief technology officer, was quoted in the media saying: "It turns out the older generation is actually really good at AI because they know what their job involves."
They use AI to do the heavy boring lifting, not the whole job.
Conversely the people leaning on AI the hardest?
Often the ones who haven't yet figured out what good looks like.
Which brings me right back to those cover letters.
AI wrote them a perfect application — it just had no idea what the job actually required.
Are we at risk of getting dumber, not smarter because we stop thinking for ourselves?
Because there's a difference between using AI to think better and using it instead of thinking.
One makes you sharper, the other just makes you sound like everyone else.
So next time you reach for the AI shortcut, ask yourself whether you actually know what a good answer looks like.
Because if you don't, you won't even know when it gets it wrong.
• Sarah Ramsay is chief executive of United Machinists.
