ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence platforms came seemingly out of nowhere, and people have been relying on them to do everything from creating emails to writing contracts. While it can seem like the perfect solution to have an artificial intelligence tool write for you, it’s not always the best idea.
There have been situations already where people have found out the hard way that ChatGPT has serious pitfalls.
Gartner recently researched the risks of the output from ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. Some of the risks identified included:
Inaccurate or entirely fabricated answers. The biggest current issue with AI and generative tools is that they can provide incorrect and sometimes entirely made-up information. For example, it’s already been demonstrated that ChatGPT has produced answers that were wrong and based on legal or scientific citations that don’t exist.
Data privacy and confidentiality were another area Gartner identified as risky. If you’re providing sensitive, confidential, or proprietary information to get an AI generative tool to write something for you, that information could then be incorporated into responses to other users.
There’s a sense of bias in the outputs produced by ChatGPT in some situations.
In particular, ChatGPT is trained on massive amounts of online data, and it can include copyrighted material, meaning the outputs could violate IP or copyright protections.
From a business perspective, using ChatGPT and not disclosing it to customers could be problematic in terms of trust and laws regarding consumer interactions.
So, what about using ChatGPT to write your resume? It’s probably not a good place to turn for resume help, either.
How ChatGPT Works
There are many generative AI tools available, but ChatGPT is the best known, and most offerings are available for free.
It responds to prompts it’s given and then searches its knowledge bank to find the most relevant information and answer. The system has been fed texts from humans, including books, dictionaries, documents, and a lot more, in order to write.
What ChatGPT is doing is essentially grabbing matching information from these millions of sources and regurgitating that to respond to your prompt.
Can You Write a Resume with ChatGPT?
Technically, yes, you can write your resume with ChatGPT. That doesn’t mean you should.
It’s simply not a replacement for what a professional writer can do, plus writing a resume using the tool can be especially problematic because it doesn’t know you. It knows information online, but that’s not going to translate to a well-written resume that’s personalized to you and quickly conveys your professional strengths and accomplishments.
The Risks of Using AI to Write Your Resume
If you’re struggling with writing your resume and you think you’ll try it with ChatGPT, specific risks include:
Unoriginal Information
The first and perhaps most significant problem is one that we’ve touched on—the information that ChatGPT is going to use to write your resume will not be original. It’s a language model incapable of original thought, so repeating is all that it can do.
You would, in theory, be feeding ChatGPT prompts with information about you and your career, and then it would be rewritten. It would mostly just be swapping out words if you were feeding it most of the needed information.
The problem?
The AI responses don’t take into consideration who you are as an individual, nor are you going to get a personalized, tailored resume. It’s going to be generic rather than highlighting how you are an asset within your industry.
The most impactful resumes are going to tell a story and have a compelling human voice behind them, and no matter the prompts you’re feeding it, ChatGPT isn’t going to achieve this for you. The creative spark that comes with human content is missing, and there’s a limited number of responses it can ultimately provide.
It won’t be able to tie together skills in your education and career journeys and then apply them to relevant roles. It’s going to seem artificial and probably overly wordy as well.
It Can Be Detected
There are AI detectors that are growing increasingly accurate. It’s a definite possibility a hiring manager would run submitted resumes through a detector, so you might end up not getting the job because of this. Depending on the hiring manager, it could be a major red flag, and they could even view it as unethical to use ChatGPT without disclosing it.
Even if a hiring manager didn’t detect AI content, it could be that your resume is plagiarized from elsewhere, which is incredibly problematic.
Your Resume Won’t Have a Cohesive Narrative
A resume isn’t simply a bulleted list of your previous roles. A powerful resume tells a story and creates a narrative about who you are. That’s where you become memorable, and that’s what’s going to make it most likely your resume gets another look from a hiring manager.
Lack of Industry Context
If you’re writing a resume, there’s going to be industry context and even jargon that need to be integrated. You also want to provide an overall sense of context for the entirety of your career, and if you don’t have a customized resume, it’s going to be very obvious. It’s going to miss this relevant context.
The specifics surrounding industries and roles often change fast, as well, and ChatGPT is currently around a year behind as far as the information it was trained on. You could wind up with an obsolete resume using AI writing.
Final Takeaways
So, can you use AI to write your resume? Sure, you can, but should you?
The answer to that is no. It’s risky in so many ways.
At a minimum, you’re probably going to find yourself with a generic and unimpressive resume. At worst, you may find that you face legal problems because of an AI-generated resume, especially if it’s plagiarized or inaccurate.
So what’s the solution? If you need resume help, Expert Resume Pros is available. We have been writing resumes for 35 years, and we understand what hiring managers are looking for and how to tell a story that conveys everything you bring to the table. Contact us for more information about our resume review and writing services.
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