Artificial intelligence screening job hunters

Posted at 5:10 PM, Sep 22, 2017
and last updated 2017-09-22 20:10:43-04

With the iPhone X recently announced, facial recognition software has been thrust back in the limelight. People are bringing up concerns about privacy, discrimination, and many other things. 

 Everywhere we go our faces are being tracked, scanned and analyzed.

In fact we found that a certain technology, called Artificial Intelligence or AI, is being used in a lot of places you might not expect. Your next job interview could be with the camera on your phone. Big hotel chains, hospitals, airlines, retailers and banks are all using it.

"I can get an interview on my phone and so I pull up an app on my phone from the email. I'd be directed to answer certain questions. I'd be prompted say 'are you ready for question one?,'" says Chief Data Officer Ben Taylor.

Taylor is the Chief Data Officer at ZIFF, a company specializing in facial recognition, and he spends a lot of time talking about AI. He says the computer then analyzes what you've said, tracks certain movements and behaviors and then translates that into whether you're hirable.

"It's actually pulling out what we call digital competencies. So that would be friendliness, attention and then the contents of what you say. So, what did you say during the interview process? How did you deliver it? And in the end it takes tens of thousands if not more points to make decisions."

Computers can assess the data to predict how well you would do as an employee.

It claims it can let people get hired faster, finds better employees for a specific job and reduce discrimination. AI can disregard things that aren't really relevant to that position. 

"Let's say there's a term you're bringing up so you're from the Bronx or you went to this particular school or from this fraternity if that correlated at all. With race, gender and age it would be thrown away."

The computer program can be taught to watch for behaviors like eye movement, smiling and micro-expressions but it can also be taught to ignore things like gender, age and race.

We asked, "Can you make the computer eliminate racism."

Taylor responded, "Yes."

"Can a human ever eliminate racism?"

He says no.

"I see this information to be used to correct bad human behavior but it could also be you don't know what people are going to use these things for."

A Stanford study released in February proved that AI can be used to tell if someone is gay or straight with a 91% accuracy.

Taylor says, "From an image I can predict sexual orientation."

He says AI is still in the early stages and what it can do is only going to get more advanced.

"It's 2017. You know as far as AI is concerned it's the future like the stuff we can do now is amazing."