Although my present employment is going well, I am still looking for a more permanent appointment and I pressed the button on another application today. What takes most time with job applications is crafting the supporting statement. My normal process, certainly for ones that will be submitted via an online form, is to work them up in Vim then paste them into Word for a final grammar and spelling check, applying suggestions I agree with back to my master text file. That avoids issues like “smart quotes” getting mangled in the submission process.

Today I decided to try another step and clicked on the recently added Copilot button. Copilot is Microsoft’s front-end AI tool and it has now been integrated with the Office 365 products. I asked it to suggest improvements to the supporting statement. In about 30 seconds it had generated a new version. What impressed me most was that it hadn’t completely rewritten it. There wasn’t even a hint of clever-sounding but completely fictitious additions to my history. Instead it functioned more or less as I would do if I could put the application away for a few days and come back to it. The suggested changes were mainly things like taking three words and replacing them with a single one with the same meaning or avoiding repetition of the same word in consecutive sentences.

For my purposes, that is a lot more useful – a slightly more clever spelling and grammar checker but one which retains my voice.