WINTRY TALES FROM THE APENNINES

Out There & In Here

Designed with WordPress

  • An AI-generated job interview (2)

    by JM

    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.

    It’s a man’s world in AI ..

  • AN AI-Generated job interview (1)

    by JM

    A few days ago I subjected myself to an AI-generated job interview. I still don’t really understand what the job was or is, but it was the experience of the interview itself that I wanted to try out.

    This type of interview has apparently been in use for at least 2 years now and it’s essentially just like a Zoom/video call, except instead of a person looking at you and speaking to you, the interview questions are generated in writing across the screen, and read out by an AI-generated voice, in my case, a cheesy male North American version. (more later )

  • An Exemplary Career

    by JM

    I had lunch a few weeks ago in Istanbul in a little place off Taksim Square with an 82-year-old friend of mine, who’s American. She used to run a book exchange/ ‘salon’ near Galata Tower and has been living in Istanbul for decades.

    In these times of whipped-up terror, she’s increasingly worried about whether her residency will be renewed or not. We were talking about work permits and being foreign and that kind of thing.

    She told me with the gleeful pride of an errant teenager:

    ” I’m the only person I know who has been sacked from 5 different volunteer jobs at various times in my working life. “

    How we laughed, as we finished off our köfte and rice !