Does a rejection from AI feel the same as one from a real person?

Joyce Carol Oates is 88. She has spent more than six decades writing novels about loneliness and longing, about the distances people can't quite name or close. In June, she gave an interview to The Guardian and said something that stayed with me: young people are sending out thousands of job applications and getting back nothing but AI-generated rejections, sometimes with AI-run interviews too. "This is destroying young people," she said. There's an unspoken premise in job hunting. Your name reaches someone, a real person, who at least considers you before saying no. You were weighed, even if you were found wanting. That premise has quietly changed. Now a system receives your data, runs it through filters, returns it. Your information was processed. No one saw you. That's what Oates means: the two feel entirely different. These past two years, a phrase has spread among fans of online creators: "AI possession," the feeling that a beloved creator has been taken over, their content flooding out in volume, the particular quality gone. There's an observation that cuts close: in some of these accounts, the creator's passion for the work had already gone cold long before AI stepped in. AI made it visible. The passion had disappeared earlier. Side by side, the two situations have the same shape. The job applicant and the fan both encountered the same thing: an expectation that someone on the other side had seen them, thought of them, done something for them. Then that expectation quietly changed. The form remained. The person was gone. The difference is here. What the applicant lost was a promise that never had the chance to form. What the fan lost, sometimes, was something that once existed and then slowly emptied out. AI is stepping into more and more of these positions. Sometimes it replaces someone who was genuinely there. Sometimes it steps into a role where the person had already left, and only the format remained. Oates said she worries about those young people sending thousands of applications. Both things are happening. The distinction is whether there was ever really anyone on the other side.