A new lawsuit has been filed by job applicants who have been rejected from jobs by an AI screening service, and they want it to be reclassified.
Applying for a new job can be a pretty strenuous process. You’ve got to have your resume in order and write a cover letter or personal attachment to give you a leg up. That’s all before you even get to an interview or testing stage.
Getting rejected based on your experience alone can be quite a difficult thing to deal with, especially when companies don’t or can’t provide any feedback that might be valuable to you moving forward.
These days, with artificial intelligence on the rise, a number of companies have admitted to scanning submissions with AI to make sure that there isn’t any AI involvement. However, being rejected by AI, without using AI yourself, is causing quite a stir.
Eightfold AI sued over job applications tool
As per the New York Times, job applicants have launched a lawsuit against Eightfold AI, which has a tool that scores applicants based on different factors.
The lawsuit wants the tools to be reclassified in a similar manner to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, prompting them to reveal what data they’re gathering and using to score applicants.
“I think I deserve to know what’s being collected about me and shared with employers. And they’re not giving me any feedback, so I can’t address the issues,” Erin Kistler, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told the Times.
The AI tool scores applicants and gathers data.
David Seligman, the executive director of Towards Justice, the non-profit firm based in Denver that’s handling the case, added: “There is no A.I. exemption to our laws.
“Far too often, the business model of these companies is to roll out these new technologies, to wrap them in fancy new language, and ultimately to just violate peoples’ rights.”
Of course, this isn’t the only AI-themed lawusit that’s been filed in recent months, nor is it the most recent crackdown.
An AI-generated novel had all of its awards stripped after winning a literature competition in Japan, while NVIDIA has been accused of using pirated material to train AI.
