As the interview progressed, the smooth sycophancy of the AI voice and its continual crooning became irksome. In response to my comments, it generated sentences like ” That’s a great answer, Jo “, ” Jo, that’s awesome ! I’d never thought of that” , ” An experienced educator like you, Jo, would be perfect for this special rôle.”
Also, it was slow to catch onto things, so I started to lose interest in the experience within the first few minutes.
But I was slow too, to understand that it was trying to direct me towards a specific task (critiquing the tone and register of a piece of written English, which must have been what it was recruiting candidates for). Once I obeyed its obsequious but insistent instructions and carried out the task, relations improved, and I found the whole thing quite intriguing.
Meanwhile, here’s something for the patriarchy again – the image that I was presented with when I asked ChatGPT to create an illustration for the first part of this story. Try it out for yourself with your own writings, and you’ll get a masculine image, default mode even in 2025.
Out There & In Here 