The story by Tim Duggan below was in the Sydney Morning Herald recently. I’ve started a small adjunct business to Republic rewriting AI generated resume ‘slop’. ‘Would you please help me’, clients plead. ‘I let a robot write my resume!’
There’s a word that’s now starting to regularly appear after the letters “AI”.
The word? “Slop”, with the full official term – “AI slop″ – describing the endless stream of low-quality content that artificial intelligence is enabling anyone to create at the click of a button.
You’re likely to see versions of lazy AI slop appear everywhere, from vomiting out lengthy reports at work, to crafting robotic-sounding prose on emails and social media, and now it’s also taking over how we apply for jobs.
Writing a resume is a prime target for AI slop, as they were already strange documents we had to cobble together every few years in a vain attempt to summarise our careers into small bullet points.
ChatGPT and other programs are being used to craft entire cover letters and resumes out of nothing, causing headaches for recruiters.
The 2024 Global Workforce Report by Remote, an HR platform, found that 83 per cent of Australian companies received AI-generated resumes in the past six months that contained inaccurate information.
Lisa Millar is an HR Business Partner at Clifford Chance, one of the world’s largest law firms, and estimates she’s seen about 40,000 CVs in her 20-year career.
She’s noticed a big change recently as AI-assisted resumes have flooded the market, especially for entry-level jobs that she specialises in.
“It is clear that resume are becoming more similar lately with students using online templates like Canva and other AI tools to assist them,” she says.
It’s becoming harder to see someone’s true personality shine through and understand who they really are.”
The tell-tale signs that a resume has been generated by a robot is the similarity in language, and a vague intended audience.
“It’s also obvious when people don’t tailor their applications to the firms they’re applying to,” she says.
So the next time you dust off your CV for an upcoming job interview, don’t just ask an AI program to churn out the same template using bland language and hand that in. Use your brains.