Claims AI can boost workplace diversity are 'spurious and dangerous'
New research highlights a growing market in AI-powered recruitment tools, used to process high volumes of job applicants, that claim to bypass human bias and remove discrimination from hiring. •These AI tools reduce race and gender to trivial data points, and often rely on personality analysis that is “automated pseudoscience,” according to Cambridge researchers. Academics have also teamed up with computing students to debunk use of AI in recruitment by building a version of the kinds of software increasingly used by HR teams. It demonstrates how random changes in clothing or lighting give radically different personality readings that could prove make-or-break for a generation of job seekers.
Recent years have seen the emergence of AI tools marketed as an answer to lack of diversity in the workforce, from use of chatbots and CV scrapers to line up prospective candidates, through to analysis software for video interviews.
Those behind the technology claim it cancels out human biases against gender and ethnicity during recruitment, instead using algorithms that read vocabulary, speech patterns and even facial micro-expressions to assess huge pools of job applicants for the right personality type and “culture fit.”
However, in a new report published in Philosophy and Technology, researchers from Cambridge’s Centre for Gender Studies argue these claims make some uses of AI in hiring little better than an “automated pseudoscience” reminiscent of physiognomy or phrenology: the discredited beliefs that personality can be deduced from facial features and skull shape.
They say it is a dangerous example of “technosolutionism”: turning to technology to provide quick fixes for deep-rooted discrimination issues that require investment and changes to company culture.
In fact, the researchers have worked with a team of Cambridge computer science undergraduates to debunk these new hiring techniques by building an AI tool modelled on the technology, available at: https://personal-ambiguator-frontend.vercel.app/
The ‘Personality Machine’ demonstrates how arbitrary changes in facial expression, clothing, lighting and background can give radically different personality readings — and so could make the difference between rejection and progression for a generation of job seekers vying for graduate positions. More