Another morning, another hangover, another tech “solution” that makes me want to pour bourbon in my coffee. Today’s topic: AI writing your cover letters. Because apparently, we’ve all collectively decided that the job application process wasn’t soul-crushing enough already.
Look, I get it. Writing cover letters is about as fun as a root canal performed by a drunk dentist. Trust me, I’ve written enough of them to wallpaper my entire apartment, including the bathroom where I spend most of my mornings regretting last night’s decisions. But here’s the thing - using AI to write your cover letters is like using a dating app to write your wedding vows. Sure, it might sound good on paper, but something essential gets lost in translation.
The promise is simple enough: feed the robot your qualifications, and out comes a perfectly polished piece of professional prose. No more staring at a blank screen, no more questioning your life choices, no more drunk-texting your ex-boss asking for a reference. Sounds perfect, right?
Wrong. Dead wrong. And here’s why.
First off, everyone and their unemployed cousin is using these AI tools now. You think you’re being clever? So do the other 500 applicants for that UX designer position at some startup that probably won’t exist in six months. What you end up with is the digital equivalent of showing up to a party where everyone’s wearing the same damn outfit. And believe me, I’ve been to enough corporate parties to know how that plays out.
But here’s where it gets really interesting - and by interesting, I mean depressing enough to make me reach for the Jack Daniels at 10 AM. Most companies are now using AI to screen these AI-generated cover letters. Let that sink in for a moment. It’s robots evaluating robots pretending to be humans trying to convince other humans to hire them. If that’s not a metaphor for modern life, I don’t know what is.
I recently tested this theory by submitting two cover letters for the same position. The first one I wrote after my usual three fingers of bourbon - typos, coffee stains, and all. The second one I had AI write while I took a smoke break. The AI version was flawless, professional, and read like every other cover letter ever written. My bourbon-fueled masterpiece? It had personality. It had flaws. It had humanity.
Guess which one got a response?
The kicker isn’t that AI writes bad cover letters - it’s that it writes perfectly mediocre ones. It’s like that guy at the bar who always plays it safe with light beer and never has an interesting story to tell. Sure, he won’t offend anyone, but nobody’s going to remember him either.
And here’s what really burns my ass about this whole situation: we’re voluntarily removing the last traces of humanity from an already dehumanizing process. Job hunting has become this weird digital mating dance where everyone’s trying to sound like they graduated from the same “Professional Buzzword Academy.” Whatever happened to just being honest? Whatever happened to saying, “Look, I need this job because rent is due and my cat judges me for eating ramen three times a week”?
The real tragedy here isn’t just that we’re letting machines write our professional love letters. It’s that we’re creating this feedback loop of artificial authenticity. Everyone’s trying to sound like everyone else, who’s trying to sound like what they think employers want to hear, who are using machines to tell them what they want to hear. It’s like a snake eating its own tail, except the snake is made of LinkedIn profiles and the tail is made of bullshit.
You want to know the truth? The best cover letter I ever wrote was composed at 3 AM, halfway through a bottle of Wild Turkey. Was it perfect? Hell no. Did it have a coffee ring on it? You bet your ass it did. But it was real. It was human. And in a world increasingly dominated by artificial everything, maybe that’s what we need more of.
So here’s my advice, for what it’s worth (about as much as my bar tab): Write your own damn cover letters. Make them messy. Make them real. Sure, you might get rejected more often. But at least you’ll get rejected for being yourself, not for being a pale imitation of what some algorithm thinks you should be.
Besides, if you’re going to spend time with artificial intelligence, wouldn’t you rather be watching sci-fi movies with a good bourbon in hand?
Time for another drink. The sun’s over the yardarm somewhere.
P.S. This post was written under the influence of Wild Turkey 101 and the crushing weight of technological dystopia. No AIs were harmed in the making of this blog post, though my liver might have something to say about it.
Source: Why you might not want to use AI to write your cover letter