Listen up, you desperate souls clutching your resumes like lottery tickets. Google’s got a new trick up its sleeve, and this time they’re coming for the career counselors. Not content with replacing taxi drivers and customer service reps, they’ve now decided that what the world really needs is an AI that pretends to be two people talking about how great you are.
I’m nursing my third coffee of the morning while trying to wrap my bourbon-addled brain around this latest piece of digital wizardry called NotebookLM. The premise is simple enough: feed it your resume, cover letter, and whatever corporate propaganda you can find about your dream company, and it spits out a podcast where two AI voices circle-jerk about your career prospects.
And you know what the real kick in the teeth is? It might actually be useful.
Now, before you accuse me of going soft, let me explain. This NotebookLM thing has one redeeming quality - it actually sticks to the facts you give it. Unlike ChatGPT, which makes up stories like that one friend who’s had too many shots and swears they once dated a supermodel, NotebookLM keeps its digital mouth shut when it doesn’t know something. In today’s world of bullshit-spewing AI, that’s practically revolutionary.
The whole setup is pretty straightforward. You upload your professional life story - the resume you’ve polished more times than I’ve polished off bottles of Wild Turkey, the LinkedIn profile that makes you sound like a combination of Steve Jobs and Mother Teresa, and whatever corporate breadcrumbs you can gather about the company you’re trying to join.
Then, like some dystopian morning show, two AI voices start chatting about you like you’re the most interesting person since Hunter S. Thompson. Except instead of fear and loathing in Las Vegas, it’s hope and optimization in the job market.
Here’s where things get really dark: we’ve reached a point where corporate culture has become so artificially inhuman that we need artificial intelligence to teach us how to appear authentically human in interviews. Let that sink in while I pour another coffee.
The article uses some poor schmuck named Avery as an example. Avery wants to be a marketing manager at some company called Acme (I’m not making this up - they actually used the cartoon company that sells exploding gadgets to coyotes as their example). So Avery feeds this AI everything from market analysis reports to the CEO’s latest PR drivel, hoping to sound like someone who lives and breathes consumer products.
And the real punch line? In today’s job market, this might be exactly what you need to do. With job postings drying up faster than my whiskey glass and everyone “spray and pray” applying to everything that moves, you need every edge you can get. Even if that edge comes from a pair of artificial voices telling you how to be more artificially perfect.
But here’s what really gets me: we’re losing something fundamental here. Remember when mentorship meant sitting down with someone who’d been in the trenches? Someone who could tell you not just what to say in an interview, but how to survive the soul-crushing reality of corporate life? Now we’re outsourcing that human connection to algorithms that wouldn’t know authentic experience if it bought them a drink.
The truth - and I hate admitting this more than I hate cheap bourbon - is that this tool might actually help some people land jobs. It might help you navigate the byzantine maze of corporate expectations and buzzwords. It might even help you ask smart questions that make you sound like you care about selling toilet paper or whatever widget they’re pushing.
But at what cost? We’re teaching a whole generation that the path to success lies in letting AI script their professional personalities. That authenticity is something to be optimized and packaged rather than lived and experienced.
Then again, maybe I’m just a dinosaur typing away in a world that’s leaving me behind. Maybe the future of career advancement is listening to robot voices tell you how to be more robotically perfect while you walk your dog or hit the treadmill.
Or maybe - just maybe - we should all take a step back and remember that the best career advice I ever got came from a bartender who told me, “Kid, just be yourself. Unless yourself is an asshole, then be someone else.”
But what do I know? I’m just a tech blogger who still believes in the radical notion that human connection matters more than algorithmic optimization.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my coffee’s getting cold and my hangover’s getting worse. Time to start my own job preparation ritual: two aspirin, a glass of water, and a shot of whatever’s left in that bottle from last night.
Stay human, you beautiful bastards.
-Henry (Written from my usual corner of O’Malley’s, where the career advice is questionable but at least comes with a side of humanity)
Source: Ace Your Next Job Interview With A Custom Podcast From NotebookLM