EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
Amazon axes AI recruiting tool that wasn’t too keen on women
Amazon.com Inc. recently had to shut down a machine learning recruiting tool because it apparently showed bias against female applicants.
According to Reuters, which first published the story, Amazon had been using artificial intelligence since 2014 to go through resumes faster than a human eye could and pick out the best talent. Resumes were scanned, and each applicant would then be scored on a scale of one to five.
Too good to be true? “Everyone wanted this holy grail,” an Amazon employee told Reuters. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”
In 2015, Amazon noticed a problem. The AI appeared to be sexist. The reason, according to the report, was that the machine had learned by looking at resumes over the past decade. During that time the vast majority of resumes came from men, and apparently the AI took that to mean men were dominant and it should stay that way.
If the resume even contained the word “women” or if the applicants had gone to a woman’s college or even played in a “women’s chess club,” that resume would be lobbed into the virtual office trashcan daubed with a one-star review.
Amazon soon realized this, but according to some sources the company was afraid the AI would come up with other ways of being discriminatory. It seems Amazon gave up on its great time-saving resume reader and disillusioned bigwigs scrapped the project early last year.
Amazon has since said that it wasn’t only gender bias why the project was disbanded. The company also said the technology was only used it in trials, but one might wonder how many of those owners of one-star resumes got their proverbial foot in the door.
It’s thought that a good number of recruiters in the near future will be employing AI to go through resumes. At the same time, employees can use AI to allegedly whip up an impeccable resume, so we might end up with AIs judging AIs. At the end of the day, a good deal of resumes will no doubt remain dubious creations of specious careers.
Image: Jenny Cestnik via Flickr
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