According to Vox, a new law passed in Illinois will give job candidates a better view into the roles AI and video play in the hiring process.
Put into effect on January 1, the Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act has three major components:
- Companies that use AI in its hiring processes must inform job applicants that AI is being used to determine applicants’ “fitness” for a certain job.
- Companies must detail how their AI works and what “general types of characteristics” it considers during candidate evaluation.
- Companies must ask an applicant’s consent to be evaluated by their AI.
The law will also offer some protection to applicants’ privacy, Vox reports: only necessary people and technology within the company can view the recorded video interview. After that, companies are required to delete any videos that an applicant submits within a month of their request.
A Dud in Disguise?
While it sounds like the Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act is protecting job candidates and keeping pace with how hiring practices are updated in this new decade, it may not be as effective as decision makers think. To start, the law is only applicable to AI used in videos, which is a smaller pool of solutions that can be monitored. Plus, the law doesn’t protect applicants who opt-out of a video interview, which puts into question whether or not that candidate is still up for a particular role.
There’s also a chance that the law will be powerless against discrimination and bias. The algorithms that are used in AI video interviews are ultimately created by people, and can exhibit those people’s values; “That means they can inherit, and even amplify, societal biases, including racism and sexism,” Vox says. There’s even a chance that the technology involved with video interviews might be characterized alongside facial recognition, which is notorious for bias: it “has faced criticism for struggling to identify and characterize the faces of people with darker skin, women, and trans and non-binary people, among other minority groups.”
As a result, the effectiveness of the law as a whole is questionable. There seems to be more hoops for companies to jump through, and unintentional calls for job candidates to either sacrifice their privacy, or a job opportunity. Based on how companies and job candidates are impacted by the law in the coming year, lawmakers might consider reworking it to offer better protection for both.
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