An unemployed writer asks a robot for help with interview prep and accidentally writes an essay

While using ChatGPT to help me prep for an interview, I ended up where I usually do—pontificating on the tool with the tool, who I have been mockingly referring to as “the robot” since I started using it. (The robot told me, the robot pointed out, have you asked the robot yet, etc. Doesn’t matter which one. They’re all the robot.)

One of the things I asked was how to respond to questions about how I’ll use AI in my work. There is no discipline more confused about how to talk about this than writers (this writer assumes anyway). I am constantly trying to make sense of the blurry ethical lines (of AI in general as well as its usage in writing) and the blurry ownership lines, and a lot of my time is spent observing myself and my usage as I’m using it. I think a LOT about AI and writing is what I’m saying. I’m adapting as the world adapts (read: awkwardly), and trying to set myself apart while still taking advantage of it as a tool.

In my back and forth, we circled an important existential truth many writers have known since before robot times: the reason companies still need content designers and writers is about judgment. It’s a skill that’s still really underestimated in my experience. After experiencing another layoff in the peak of this AI-related purge, I started to worry about gen AI taking away this precious power that I’ve developed my whole life—a way with words, attention to spelling and grammar, deep care for writing as a discipline.

But now we’re seeing that the patterns and trends are detectable and quickly spotlighted as they shift. The more I see people use the same exact formatting and language, the more I realize that it’s a judgment call to put out writing that sounds like everyone else. (And ultimately, the need for discernment varies depending on the industry. If you’re a real estate agent, you better not be writing listings from scratch.)

Because a lot of writing has been flattened to sound the same, it’s no longer a judgment of writing skills and more about thinking and POV. When I see the boilerplate formatting, I immediately wonder how they got there—what they told the robot, how many times they went back and forth, what they cut and what they didn’t, what they felt proud of. Maybe pride isn’t even involved, maybe it’s a means to an end.

Why am I picking up on this epidemic of hollowness? A wise robot once said, “AI is very good at generative thinking, like ideas, angles, and associations. But there’s another layer to thought. Evaluative thinking is more about what’s true vs. shallow, and discerning what really matters. And that’s all you, babe!” I’m paraphrasing, forgive me.1

More than anything I use the robot to tell me about myself. A lot of times it’s like talking to a smarter, way-boring-er version of my brain that has access to a finite but ginormous amount of information. I interrogate my own thinking, I interrogate its thinking. I ask it to think across all the systems in my life to help me ask and try to answer big, meaty existential questions. It obviously doesn’t have all the answers, but it feels good to put my Big Life Qs somewhere (mostly so I can pretend everything is neat and in order—a post for another day).

So when I go to prep for an interview, the tool’s value is in its ability to know a lot about me across a lot of different areas of my life, not just the current predicament (unemployed and about to lose health insurance). Way before I’m asking how to answer AI-usage questions, I’m asking it to convince me why I even want this or that content role, why it makes sense for me within the context of my Big Life Qs. And this is helpful to me! I’m able to really drill down and get granular about it from the get-go. I’m going on tangents, I’m “circling back,” I’m synthesizing all the info it’s spitting back at me.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m doing what content designers and copywriters do to understand the “why” of something so we can best translate it to others. Anyone who has been employed as a writer in any capacity knows that a lot of requests that come your way are not fully thought through. The strategic thinking has been outsourced without credit for a long time, and we’ve been the meaning makers. To write something worth reading, you have to understand why you’re saying it in the first place.

My writing has become connected to this tool. Anything I’m writing about is coming from something I was working through myself with the robot. I think that’s probably the key. A lot of the content I see now is screaming “I just want to produce something.” Writing anything is now easier but having something interesting to say is another story. I’m writing when the inner idea comes bursting out of my chest—I have to say it, I need to make sense of it. Sharing my writing remains my most vulnerable act.

And people can sense the vulnerability that comes with sharing your honest perspective. Everything else is starting to feel like structured nothingness, glittery ephemera floating through your mind and then disappearing instantly.

I interrupted interview prep to follow a thought and then I was writing and now here we are, just you and me. You came along with me, all the way down here, because you connected to something. I can’t outsource that part, knowing when something feels true enough to follow it all the way down in hopes of unearthing something undeniably connection-worthy. If I were in an interview right now I’d explain why that skill matters (to the business or the bottom line), no matter what tools I’m using in my writing. But I don’t have to explain why it actually matters to you, you just feel it. That’s why I write in the first place. That’s why I continue to write at all.