The bourbon was down to the dregs, the ice had surrendered hours ago, and I was staring at a headline that made me pour another inch anyway.
“If You’re a Real Person Looking for a Job, the Flood of Fake AI Job Applications Will Make Your Blood Boil.”
Good. Let it boil. Maybe the heat will kill something.
A tech publication called The Markup posted a job for an engineer. Within twelve hours, they had four hundred applications. Most of them fake. AI-generated slop from bots wearing human masks, feeding carefully crafted lies assembled by other machines.
The red flags were everywhere. Repeating contact info. Dead LinkedIn links. Responses following a “near-identical four-sentence pattern.” Some wrote “ChatGPT says” in their answers. One claimed they’d built the company’s website. They hadn’t. They didn’t exist. Nobody home.
So The Markup pulled their listing off the platforms. Glassdoor, Indeed, all of it. Went back to word-of-mouth. You knew a guy who knew a guy.
Full circle. Back to asking around at the bar.
The machines were supposed to help us. That was the pitch. Make things faster, easier. Nobody planned for this — the moment when the machines started applying for jobs themselves.
Not replacing jobs. That’s been happening for decades. This is different. Machines flooding the entrance, crowding out the humans trying to get through the door.
It’s not even malicious. It’s just optimization. Some genius built a tool to apply to a thousand jobs with one click. Another genius built a cover letter generator. A third made fake LinkedIn profiles. Nobody asked what happens when everyone uses them at once.
The slop rises. The system clogs. And the only way to hire anyone is to ignore it entirely and call your friends.
The Markup found their engineer. Good for them. But they’re small and connected. What about the company in Dayton that doesn’t know anyone? What about the machine shop that needs a welder? They’re wading through ghosts, looking for a pulse.
And the job seeker? The real one? The person who got laid off, or graduated into a market that doesn’t want them? They’re competing with an army of bots that never sleep, never get discouraged. The bots just keep applying. Forever.
I used to sort mail at the post office. Letters came in, letters went out. Humans touching paper, making it go somewhere. It was tedious. Soul-crushing. But I could hold the failure in my hands when I fucked up.
Now the failure is invisible. Distributed across a thousand servers. Drowning in slop that nobody asked for.
Somewhere out there, a machine is applying for a job it’ll never show up to. And a human is watching their application disappear, wondering why nobody ever calls back.
They call 2025 the year of the “Great Frustration.” The headline says 2026 could be worse.
I believe it.
Maybe it’s time to stop asking the machines for permission. Shut off the platforms. Pick up the phone. Ask around.
The human way.
It worked before. It’ll have to work again.
I finished what was left in the glass. The bottle was empty but I wasn’t. Small victories.