I heard about my first ChatGPT interview

Yesterday I heard about my first “ChatGPT interview”

Let me paint the picture. My friend is hiring for a Marketing Manager position. One of the final steps is a remote panel interview with two executive team members.

The interviewee looks distracted. After each question they pause, looking at a screen to their left, and then proceed to recite their answer to the interview question.

And their answers are weird.

Overly formal. Full of buzzwords. Devoid of specifics about their background or experience, but seemingly very polished. A few questions in, my friend realizes that this candidate is feeding the questions into ChatGPT, and then just reading out the answers.

Spoiler: they didn’t get the job.

Of course, they didn’t. (and they clearly didn’t take our interview prep advice.)

They broke the (my) cardinal rule of AI:

Outsource doing, not thinking.

And by having AI do an interview, they outsourced their thinking.

GPT4 isn’t a thinking machine. Remember, large language models use math to make predictions about language. GPT4 isn’t answering your question, it’s predicting the next most likely word in a sentence based on your prompts.

It’s not thinking, it’s autocomplete-ing.

When you have a problem or an idea, it's better to sit with it, research, mull it over, and chat with smart friends. If you just ask a bot— you miss the opportunity to exercise the muscle of your mind.

After a while, your ability to think critically, solve problems, tell a good story, or even answer questions about your own experience… atrophies.

Then the risk becomes that no one is thinking.

And good marketers have to be really good thinkers.

Good marketers are empathetic storytellers. They’re nimble, socially aware, and creative. Like the folks at Pixar were on Friday, or the folks at Nike were for the NCAA finals.

Good thinkers come up with campaigns like this:

If the Nike team had fired their copywriters or forced them to use ChatGPT, here’s what the campaign would look like:

*shivers* gross.

The next time you open up ChatGPT, pause and ask yourself:

Am I outsourcing doing, or thinking here?

If you’re not sure, here’s a handy guide:

❌ Using it to write content, build creative, or strategize

✅ Using it to summarize, note take, outline, assist or unblock

Your creativity, strategy, and ideas are what make you a great marketer.

The robots just can’t do it like you can.

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