By: Victoria Nash
The technology to interview with a robot is present and may be taking over the human resources industry. Chat GPT and other AI have been speculated as potentially taking jobs from humansin years to come. Some businesses and agencies are in favor ofAI because they would avoid paying wages, health insurance, dental insurance, maternity leave, and other paid time off pay structures. However, workers are against AI because they would take their jobs and are bias machines that may not choose the best hire for the role. Congress has not passed any legislation onAI in the human resources department, but they do have ideas. For example, the American Data Privacy Protection Act wants to limit AI in the decision-making process on interview candidates, there are new and changing regulations occurring rapidly on the state level.
The States governments have all rapidly passed legislature to regulate AI to protect privacy, safety online and jobs. Such as California who has passed the SB 101, Bolstering the Online Transparency Act (2018), which makes it unlawful for a Bot to be used to incentivize, buy services, or influence a vote in an election. According to the California Business and Professional Code, a bot is defined as “an automated online account where all or substantially all of the actions or posts of that account are not the result of a person.” More recently, in January 2023 Tennessee enacted the Tennessee Information Protection Act, which protects users from companies from saving and using data to influence users. This bill gives the Attorney General’s Office authority to impose civil penalties who use intrusive tactics on person’s personal data.
New York City is a city government that is on the forefront of AI legislation with the hiring process. They passed the Local Law 144, which requires employers to conduct bias audits of AI tools used for employment decisions. Especially automated employment decision tools (AEDTs), the bias audit would occur within a year of implementation by an independent auditor. This legislation is an important first step towards fighting against bias and discrimination.
The AI machines used in hiring showed bias in large companies such as Amazon. Amazon has become one of the biggest e-commerce business and automation has been key to their success. They used a hiring process that rated candidates from one to five stars, it would narrow the candidates from one hundred applicants to five. This sounds convenient and fair,however, the computer models were trained from observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company for the past 10-year period, which were male dominated. The computer model learned to penalize resumes with women, such as “women’s basketball captain”. Even though the amazon AI tool was discriminatory based on sex, other companies still used bias AI tools to find best fit candidates, such as Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Linked In.
AI hiring tools quickly analyze resumes and hasten the daunting hiring process, but AI is not the solution quite yet. There is massive potential for using an AI to distill down resumes, finding a bias in a workplace without AI is difficult, proving bias by a machine is even more difficult. Especially when the data the AI pulls is biased information and statistics from past years. Even more concerning is 83% of employers, including 99% of Fortune 500 companies, now use automated systems, according to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. AI could be helpful and a great priming tool but not in the present.Companies should be using neutral statistics and non-biased based statistics. However, companies cannot make data/quotason how they want their companies to look because that creates a quota system that the AI follows directly. Creating a quota system by race, gender, or age is against federal employment discrimination law. Therefore, statistics do not have the capabilities of knowing biased data or to account for historical social inequities.
AI is a great tool to make data entry quicker, making your job faster, but not with decision-making processes. AI is not learning they are discriminating against historically stigmatized groups of people, including women, people of color and people with physical disabilities. Computers trying to replace the human resources department is quite interesting and the hiring process should be expedited, but AI is not the best source of expediting your hiring process. In conclusion, AI should be used for ideas, a primer to start working on new ideas, data entry, accounting, but not to make decisions based on biased statistics in their computer models for hiring potential workers.
Student Bio: Victoria Nash is a second-year student at Suffolk University Law School. She is a Staff Writer for the Journal of High Technology Law. She graduated from the College of the Holy Cross with a Bachelor of Liberal Arts.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.
