Last month, my neighbor Mark came over looking stressed. Not the usual “I forgot to buy milk” stressed. The kind of stressed where you haven't slept and you're staring at a blinking cursor on a blank document for three hours.

He’d been laid off six weeks prior. Good guy, solid experience in project management. But that blank page? It had him beat. So he did what anyone in 2026 would do. He opened ChatGPT.

“Here,” he said, showing me his phone. “This took ten seconds. Is it... any good?”

I read it. It was fine. Actually, it was better than fine. It was grammatically perfect, nicely formatted in plain text, and hit all the keywords you’d want: Agile, Stakeholder Management, Cross-functional Teams.

But here’s the thing. Reading it felt like looking at a photograph of a meal instead of eating it. You could see the ingredients, but you couldn’t taste it.

That got me thinking. In the rush to use AI for everything, are we losing the one thing a resume actually needs to do? It’s not just a list of jobs. It’s a story about why you’re worth hiring.

The Case for the Robot

Let’s give credit where it’s due. ChatGPT is terrifyingly good at some parts of this.

Staring at a blank page is the worst. AI kills that problem instantly. You feed it your job title and a few bullet points, and it spits out something coherent. It’s a perfect warm-up act. It’s also great at translating your vague “I was in charge of stuff” into corporate-speak that gets past the automated tracking systems.

I tested it myself. I asked it to rewrite a boring bullet point from my own old marketing job. I wrote: “Helped with the company blog.”

ChatGPT gave me back: “Spearheaded content strategy for corporate blog, resulting in a 15% increase in organic traffic over six months.”

Honestly? That’s impressive. It’s specific, it sounds important, and it uses the word “spearheaded.” (Which, by the way, is a word nobody uses in real life, but recruiters apparently love it.)

So if your goal is to sound like a perfect, polished corporate clone, the AI wins. It’s fast. It’s clean. It never says “um.”

The Problem with Perfect

But when I read that AI version of my old job, I felt a little weird. Did I really “spearhead” anything? I just liked writing and asked my boss if I could do more of it.

That’s the rub. AI doesn’t know the messy, human details. It doesn’t know that you started that project because you noticed a customer problem nobody else saw. It doesn't know you stayed late to help a colleague who was struggling, even though it wasn't your job. It doesn't know you're funny in meetings, or that people trust you.

A resume written entirely by AI is like a movie trailer that gives away the whole plot. It’s accurate, but there’s no mystery. No reason to actually watch the film.

I saw this firsthand when a friend asked me to compare two resumes for a junior designer role at her company. One was clearly AI-generated. It was flawless. Every bullet point started with a strong action verb. There were no gaps. It was boring.

The other was a mess. The formatting was a little off. One bullet point just said, “I make things look good.” But buried in the mess was a line about how she’d redesigned the menu for a local restaurant just for fun, and the restaurant’s sales went up. That’s the one my friend called for an interview.

Why? Because the messy one showed thinking. The perfect one just showed compliance.

So, What’s the Move?

Look, I’m not here to tell you to boycott AI. That’s stupid. It’s a tool. But it’s a tool you need to use like a human, not like a robot giving orders.

Here’s what I’ve started telling people like Mark:

Use AI for the heavy lifting. Get it to fix your grammar. Ask it to rephrase that clunky sentence. Tell it to list the top five skills for your industry and see if you’re missing any. Treat it like a really fast, slightly unimaginative intern.

But you have to be the editor-in-chief. Read what it writes and ask yourself: does this sound like me? If the answer is no, change it. Swap out “utilized” for “used.” Add the detail it left out—the time you saved the client account by catching a mistake nobody else noticed.

Put the human stuff back in. Did you lead the team charity drive? Mention it. Did you learn a new skill just because you were curious, not because your job required it? Put it in. Those are the things AI would never tell you to include, because they don’t fit the formula.

When Mark and I sat down to rewrite his resume, we kept some of what ChatGPT wrote. The structure was good. The basics were covered. But then we added the stuff the AI didn’t know. Like the time he stepped in to run a project when the manager quit suddenly, and how the team actually pulled together and delivered early. The AI didn’t know about the team part. It just saw a completed project.

Can ChatGPT write a better resume than you?

It can write a cleaner resume. It can write a faster resume. It can write a resume that checks all the boxes.

But a better resume? One that actually makes someone want to meet you?

That still takes a human.

Want to create a professional resume? Try our free resume builder today.