An Ethicist’s Take: is It OK to Lie to an AI Chatbot During a Job Interview?
upstart writes:
An ethicist's take: Is it OK to lie to an AI chatbot during a job interview?:
If you're secure in your job, you may not have encountered just yet how AI is "elevating" and "enhancing" the job search experience, for employers and job seekers alike. Its use is most clearly felt in the way high-volume staffing agencies have begun to employ AI chatbots to screen applicants well before they interact with a human hiring manager.
From the employer's perspective, this makes perfect sense. Why wade through stacks of resumes to weed out the ones that don't look to be a good fit even just on first glance, if an AI can do that for you?
From the job seeker's perspective, the experience is likely to be decidedly more mixed.
This is because many employers are using AI not just to search a body of documents, screening them for certain keywords, syntax, and so on. Rather, in addition to this, search firms are now using AI chatbots to subsequently "interview" applicants to screen them even more thoroughly and thus further winnow the pool of resumes a human will ultimately have to go through.
Often, this looks the same as conversing with ChatGPT. Other times, it involves answering specific questions in a standard video/phone screen where the chatbot will record your answers, thereby making them analyzable. If you're a job seeker and you find yourself in the latter scenario, don't worry, they will give the chatbot a name like "Corrie" and that will put you completely at ease and in touch with a sense of your worth as a fully-rounded person.
On the job seeker's side, this is where the issues begin to arise.
If you know your words are being scanned by a gatekeeper strictly for certain sets of keywords, what's the incentive to tell the whole truth about your profile? It's not possible to intuit what exact tally or combo of terms you need to hit, so it's better to just give the bot all of the terms listed in the job description and then present your profile more fully at the next stage in an actual interview with a human. After all, how would a job seeker present nontraditional experience to the bot with any assurance it will receive real consideration?
Indeed, when the standardadvice is to apply for jobs of interest even when you only bring somewhere between 40-to-60% of the itemized skills and background, why take the risk the chatbot sets the bar higher?
For a job seeker, lying to the bot - or at least massaging the facts strategically for the sake of impressing a nonhuman gatekeeper - is the best, most effective means of moving on to the next stage in the hiring process, where they can then present themselves in a fuller light.
But what are the ethics of such dishonesty? Someone who lies to the chatbot would have no problem lying to the interviewer, some might say. We're on a slippery slope, they would argue.
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