- YouTuber sends an AI avatar to attend an interview with an AI avatar
- Graham Dot Zip performs popular AI bot trolling pranks on his YouTube channel
- His AI avatar negotiated a salary over 50% lower than instructed
A YouTube comedian has used an AI avatar to represent him in a job interview for an organization that uses AI avatars to conduct interviews. The results, shared online by YouTuber Graham Dot Zip, demonstrates the apparent weaknesses of the approach, while also being pretty amusing.
Graham Dot Zip found that while the interviewing AI was open to him using his own representative, the automated tools ultimately failed to negotiate a salary successfully.
The use of AI interviewers has increased over the past couple of years, but is increasingly bemoaned by jobseekers looking for an employer they can feel a connection to.
Pat, meet Victor
To explore the effectiveness (or otherwise) of AI interviewers, Graham Dot Zip, a YouTuber with a library of previous trolling and pranks against AI chatbots, set up his own AI avatar.
Graham’s AI bot “Victor” was introduced at the beginning of the interview with the AI bot conducting the interview, “Pat.” Almost immediately, things to go wrong.
It is perhaps inevitable that the AI would make some mistakes. Attempting to undersell Graham’s salary expectations is a notable example of this.
“Graham is incredibly flexible on that front, Pat. He's primarily focused on finding the right fit and a great team. So he would be very comfortable around 60,000.”
Except that isn’t what was established before the conversation. In fact, it is far lower than the “something more in the range of like $140 to $150,000” that Graham attempts to move the negotiation onto, albeit unsuccessfully.
The interview hallucination
There are also moments in which our old friend the AI hallucination appears.
At one point, Graham is surprised by some of the things Victor describes about his resume, so decides to pause things, and chat to the bot: “Victor, I love what you're doing. You're making me look really good, but I think you're making me look a little bit too good, okay? I think you can probably turn up the volume on my experience like 10%, but right now you're just outright fabricating things that aren't true. So, don't tell them that I manage people, because I'm just a marketing coordinator and I think that might backfire.”
Oddly, the exchange ends with each AI politely communicating compliments and niceties… and would perhaps still be chatting now had Graham not intervened.
For companies employing AI interviewers, the takeaway here is clear: they’re not doing what you think they are. Furthermore, prospective employees are typically turned off by the notion of an AI interview. Hiring needs the human touch.