The Job Interview From Hell

 Starting in 2018, I was able to make a decent living making and selling jewelry. Then in the autumn of 2019, I got zapped with a trio of really awful health problems all at the same time and my entire life just fell apart for a few months. And then we all know what happened in the first few months of 2020 - when the pandemic hit and everything changed, literally overnight. 

I won't go into all the philosophical musings I've had about the early days of the pandemic in this blog, but I will say that it was actually a decent time for someone trying to sell jewelry online and do online classes. I was able to make some decent money because most people were at home, looking at their phones or their computers to ward off the existential dread of boredom.

But then things changed, and online sales all about evaporated as everyone rushed to "get back to normal". 

So I started looking for some kind of stable income again, hopeful that I'd be able to find a job. 

I didn't. 

Find a job, that is. At least not one with any stable income.

I managed to pick up a few freelance blogging gigs and wrote a few articles for some print publications, but those were few and far between, and the freelancing thing is just not for me. 

So I was hopeful a few weeks ago when I got an invite to interview for a position I applied for at a small digital marketing agency out in Colorado. It seemed to fit my criteria: a small company (less than 20 employees), remote (meaning I can work from anywhere as long as I'm available during their time zone business hours), and primarily working with small businesses. Cool, cool.

The first interview went great with the VP of Operations. I had all the skills and qualifications they were looking for: 7+ years of experience in writing and editing for both print and digital, SEO skills, etc. During the interview, she asked me briefly if I had any experience with AI generated content, and I said truthfully, not that much. 

AI generated content has become a problem for writers like me, as we're currently seeing with the strike out in L.A. and N.Y. Movie studios and production companies want to use AI to put actual human writers and artists and actresses/actors out of work because, huh, cheaper. Go figure.

So I didn't think too much about it, and the VP was really impressed and said she wanted to get me in front of the CEO of the company early the following week. 

Wow, I was psyched! This was the best prospect I'd had for sustainable, steady employment in over a year, so I jumped on it. 

Next week rolls around, and my interview on Monday morning comes up. I log in a few minutes early, and pretty soon I was seeing both the VP of Operations and this dudebro CEO in our Google Meet. We start to chat, and then Dudebro CEO wants to talk about AI.

"What kind of experience do you have with AI generated content?" he asked me.

"Not a lot," I replied truthfully.

"Why is that?" he asked. 

"Well, none of the places I currently write for allow us to submit AI generated content."

"Why do you think that is?", Dudebro wants to know. 

I was completely dumbfounded by that question. As if it was even a question. I really had no idea how to explain to this guy why these places wanted ME to write something, and not just some AI generated generic crap.

I started to stutter. 

"Well, um, I think because they want to use me - us, meaning the rest of the freelance team - they want our expertise."

Dudebro CEO shook his head. 

"Well," he continued, "We're looking for someone who will fully embrace the technology of AI and use it to its fullest potential. I mean, it's here - and just look, they're already striking about it out in L.A." And he scoffed a little bit at that.

I didn't tell him that I have friends on both coasts who are currently part of that picket line and are trying to save their livelihoods and their art.

Maybe I should have?

At any rate, we talked for a few more minutes before he asked me to do an AI-generated blog as a sample for him. Okay, I don't usually do shit like that unpaid, but fuck it. The VP said she would send me some SEO keywords. 

A couple hours later, she sends me a list of eleven SEO keywords. I ask her, Which one should be the primary?

She replies, Just consider them all primary. 

Clearly, this chick had ZERO knowledge about SEO. You don't have eleven keywords as primary keywords in a piece of content. Last I checked, you don't want more than four, because any more than that, and the search engine bots are gonna dump your content down to the last page. 

So I chose one primary keyword and a couple of secondary keywords and plugged them in to ChatGPT and a few seconds later, I had a very generic, dry, soulless piece of content that fit the bill. I sent it in, and didn't hear squat from them until the following week when the VP emailed me to let me know that they were "pursuing another candidate".

Not a huge surprise, but a huge letdown just the same.

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Now, here's where I have thoughts. 

First off, AI-generated content might be fine if you want your business website to sound like every single other bland, cardboard-dry, soulless mindfuck of a marketing tool. I mean, seriously. You wanna sound like corporate? Sure, use ChatGPT, and you'll sound like corporate. No problem.

But here's the thing: the very process of marketing itself reduces humans to dollar signs, in a way. You're trying to find out how to reach the greatest number of people and turn their pain points into your profits. And you know, that might not always be a bad thing, because if it's another human (like me) reaching out to other humans (like you) in my own unique voice with an offering of a Tarot class or a class on how to play the ukulele or a piece of a gemstone that's been cut and cabbed and wire wrapped into a lovely pendant, there's that human connection there.

Plugging in ideas to ChatGPT for it to spit out some kind of soulless mindfuckery marketing is just...well, mindless. You lose the human connection. There's no longer a human trying to reach another human, there's a human using an automated algorithm to reach a human. 

It's just not the same.

Plus you add in to that the fact that none of these AI programs actually create something original, and they're just regurgitating stuff that humans have already written and fed into the AI to "train" it. And that feels extra icky. Like state-sanctioned plagirism or some shit. 

I mean, why wouldn't magazines just start cranking out content using AI platforms for their articles? There's an article just waiting to be written - I can interview all of the editors I've worked with and ask them why they don't want AI generated content for their magazines and websites and blogs. 

Because I'm still struggling to understand how to explain that to someone like Dudebro CEO there.

How can I explain the instrinsic value of a human to someone who can't see it? I mean, why bother with humans at all? 

Seriously, the whole AI bot thing is a huge slippery slope that just removes us one more step from our humanity and our connection with nature and ourselves. 

But that's just my opinion. 

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Soooooooo... Here I am. Still looking for work of some sort that pays me on a regular basis. But I think I might give up that search for a while and focus on some other things.