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Your Next Job Interview Could Be With a Racist Bot (thedailybeast.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: Companies across the nation are now using some rudimentary artificial intelligence, or AI, systems to screen out applicants before interviews commence and for the interviews themselves. As a Guardian article from March explained, many of these companies are having people interview in front of a camera that is connected to AI that analyzes their facial expressions, their voice and more. One of the top recruiting companies doing this, Hirevue, has large customers like Hilton and Unilever. Their AI scores people using thousands of data points and compares it to the scores of the best current employees. But that can be unintentionally problematic. As Recode pointed out, because most programmers are white men, these AI are actually often trained using white male faces and male voices. That can lead to misperceptions of black faces or female voices, which can lead to the AI making negative judgments about those people. The results could trend sexist or racist, but the employer who is using this AI would be able to shift the blame to a supposedly neutral technology. Companies are also having people do their first interview with an AI chatbot. "One popular AI that does this is called Mya, which promises a 70 percent decrease in hiring time," reports The Daily Beast. "Any number of questions these chatbots could ask could be proxies for race, gender or other factors."

5 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This why we shouldn't live together ... by Pinky's+Brain · · Score: 4, Informative

    "because most programmers are white men, these AI are actually often trained using white male faces and male voices"

  2. Re:This why we shouldn't live together ... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, we do. Studies have found that even having a female dominated HR division still tends to favour men in most instances. Counter-intuitive if you are the kind of person who assumes genders will "stick together" and are inherently biased in favour of their own, but anyone familiar with the past century of academic work on the subject will be unsurprised.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Re: It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Unemployment is the lowest in 67 years.

    Unemployment was lower during the Clinton administration, which I'm pretty sure was less than 67 years ago.

    See September of 2000, for example:

    http://www.macrotrends.net/137...

    And that the three main measurements of unemployment, the official overall, the U5 and the U6.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  4. Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing by edtice1559 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Although your comment is quite valid in that the markets for various low-skilled labor do have an effect on each other, very few low-skilled immigrants work retail where English/Spanish language skills are fairly important. They may stock the shelves, though. Most low-skill immigrants work physically demanding jobs that natives won't take like meat processing and agriculture.

  5. Re:It's absolutely ridiculous and dehumanizing by ooloorie · · Score: 4, Informative

    What are these horrible, scary regulations that you speak of? Name some.

    Regulations that make it illegal to ask questions about children, marital status, gender, ethnic origin, etc. Legal practice that gets companies sued simply for not hiring enough minorities.

    Oh, fuck you

    Thanks for the offer, but I prefer my men a little smarter than you are.