Over the past month a new AI chatbot called ChatGPT has been drawing a lot of
attention.
And big predictions about how it might cause problems with automatic generation
of school assignments, essays, maybe even scripts and novels someday.
But we wanna stick with business because what if you could use a chatbot like this
to help you get a job?
Not necessarily in making up your entire resume, I'll leave that to George Santos
but maybe writing a cover letter or something like that.
There was an experiment done in this area, and we're gonna get to it in a second.
But just in case you're not that familiar with, how these AI chatbots work.
Take a look at this.
>> Alongside ChatGPT and
DALL.E 2 is GPT-3 a natural language system that can also write argue and code.
And ChatGPT uses an upgraded version of this to create text at incredible speeds.
According to a statement from open AI we've trained a model called ChatGPT
which interacts in a conversational way.
The dialogue format makes it possible for
ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes,
challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests.
The software itself has been trained by AI and
machine learning with massive amounts of text data from various sources.
It corrects grammar, it summarizes difficult text into simple concepts.
It converts movies into emojis, and it fixes bugs in Python code.
>> And so you can see there the basic idea of how this works.
I've used ChatGPT quite a bit and I think their description there
was quite accurate both of how it works, some of its limitations.
But when it comes to getting a job, we're gonna talk about an experiment that was
run by Beatrice Nolan of business insider.
Who used ChatGPT to look at job descriptions and put together cover
letters to try to potentially get hired for that job and used it to give to
the people who evaluate these things to see what they thought of it.
So one of the jobs was for a social media assistant.
Another was for a purchase ledger clerk and
the two different recruiters that evaluated these cover letters said that
they looked like they'd been written by genuine candidates.
It was not in any way immediately clear that these
were entirely produced by an AI chatbot, not by an actual human.
One who works for Reed, Chris Wilshire said we would likely think this was
written by a genuine candidate and follow up with a screening call.
The structure of the letter is good, but
it lacks some detail around the company they're applying for.
Stephanie Petry of Jobber says their writing style is not what I would expect
from someone in that role.
Their tone is too formal and dry, and I expect them to show more creativity and
character.
And by the way in my own use of ChatGPT, it does tend to start off pretty dry.
But the thing is you can take something that it's generated for instance,
a cover letter like this that the tone might not be right for, and
you can say I want you to remake this.
But be more conversational, use more slaying, maybe throw in a joke and
it will reevaluate and do that.
And so this experiment was like the most simplistic version you feed in a bit of
information about the job and
then the first pass of what it produces is what you give.
But if somebody was willing to put in just a little bit of time to add a few extra
facts, maybe tweak the style a little bit.
I could see this potentially being used by
people to get inquiries from people hiring.
>> I can even see it being used to replace talk show hosts.
>> I have actually done some research and that's largely what's happened on CNN and
MSNBC for several decades.
>> Well, by the way that 100%, there you go.
I mean, if Wolf Blitzer's real name isn't ChatGPT.
I don't know what is.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] Okay, so look, I think this is
an interesting sign of the times because everything is about to be fake.
We've got deepfakes, we've got videos now where it is really hard
to tell if that's the real person or not the real person in the video.
You got pictures that are nearly impossible to tell that's been around for
quite some time.
And now you've got things that can be written and created.
That sounds very human.
Either a formal human or maybe even a less formal human.
So we're about to enter a trippy world.
I mean, it's already super trippy.
I mean if you just ask your parents what they think, and
they'll tell you some nonsense they read on Facebook that is even close to true,
but we're about to supercharge that.
Jordan, what do you think?
>> I don't know how I feel about it.
I agree with you, Cenk, the future is really strange and
uncertain and the role, not just like deepfakes and
things like this, like AI generating images or art and now text.
But also just the way social media has been fully integrated
into our lives and a key component of our lives.
It seems deeply unhealthy, but since we're almost at a time it's the end of the year,
I'm gonna argue that this is a good thing because applying for jobs.
>> [LAUGH] >> Sucks.
Applying for job after job, if you're really desperate to find a job, the worst
part is the cover letters because most employers don't even read them.
They read the first graph, they look at your resume, and
they decide within 30 seconds whether or not they like you.
I'd say on this issue specifically go for it,
spam ChatGPT and fill out those stupid cover letters.
In 2023, I really hope we can move beyond requiring a cover letter or
a written statement or writing assignments.
All this extra homework for these jobs, especially when doing that,
there's no guarantee you're even gonna get a call back.
It is such a hurdle for people to apply for these jobs over and over and
over again, especially if they're desperate to find work.
I say go for it.
I don't care. >> Yeah.
>> I'm just gonna be a contrarian on this point.
>> Yeah. >> I think you're fair.
>> Yeah, I agree and disagree.
So first of all, I remember when I supply for jobs, cover letters were the worst,
I hated cover letters.
Why do you make me write this thing?
That is obviously inauthentic, okay?
But Jordan as it turns out you're wrong.
Sometimes people do read the cover letters because I did have one cover letter that I
wrote that was very authentic.
It was a job I really wanted and
Frank Luntz did reply back saying it was a wonderful cover letter.
>> [LAUGH] >> That is a true story from about 27
years ago when I was graduating from law school, I was in political nerd and
I knew Frank Luntz was an incredible pollster, which is true.
He's a top Republican pollster.
And back then I was a Republican, and I wrote this heartfelt cover letter, and
he said, man, damn, that was good.
Nonetheless, didn't hire me.
Maybe he sniffed out Libs somewhere in there and it's gonna go wrong.
So he was right about that too.
But look, one of the things that I have a problem with is nobody's gonna
write an actual homework assignment from now on.
I mean, my kids already cheat on spelling grammar nonstop the minute they're on
the computer, the computer fixes all their spelling, so
they don't know how to spell anything.
And now since John explained that you could personalize things on ChatGPT and
say, because in the old days, so I graded exams for
troubleshooting on some silly TV show that I was a part of.
And half the kids just took giant blocks from Wikipedia and
put it into their papers.
It was hilarious because it's like they're barely trying like someone would leave
wikipedia.com on there org or whatever on there, all right?
And guys, this is awful, all right?
But if ChatGPT could personalize it, which it sounds like you can,
we're gonna have no idea that the papers are fake.
>> Mm-hm. >> Everything's gonna be fake.
No, I vote no.
Let the record note that my vote is irrelevant, and the future is fake.
John, my last question to you is so what do you use it for that's legit?
Well, really fast I'll say I disagree with your last point.
I don't know how to express my thoughts, but I'm gonna use my computer for a second
and have it come up with a counterargument which it could totally do by the way.
So I've tried to use it for creative stuff.
Trying to help me in, like honestly for my fiction writing doing some world
building stuff, trying to get it to be creative and synthesize different things.
The limitation is that it's not a particularly creative.
There are big limitations.
This it's not super creative.
It effectively reads a bunch of stuff online and will tell it to you.
It doesn't know if what it's saying is interesting.
It doesn't know if what it's saying is true.
It knows that things are facts in that it's found them somewhere,
but it can't evaluate critically whether the things it's saying are true.
It tends to use a similar voice from topic to topic.
And so after you've used this a lot you can almost tell when something has been
produced by.
It's not clear to someone who's new, but there are ticks that it uses.
It is already incredible, and I'm sure it'll get better.
But I've found it to actually be quite limited at least in the way that I would
want to use it.
>> Mm-hm, all right? So we'll have to wait a tiny bit before
the future becomes completely fake.
Fair enough.