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New York City’s AI hiring law takes effect
- yxre 3y agoI don't see any antidote to the effects of AI on society except regulation. This is a good first step forward, but it needs to go further.
- ghiculescu 3y agoWhat effects need an antidote?
- peterfirefly 3y agoNoticing how the world is. That's dangerous and "biased".
- crooked-v 3y ago"How the world is" includes "people named Jared are better employees", apparently.
- kibwen 3y agoThe problem here is conflating "the world" with "the training set". If your data isn't representative of the world, then, yes, that introduces bias.
- abigail95 3y agoi dont want a fair sample of the whole world. i want a highly biased sample of attributes in the extreme tail end which will have all sorts of weirdness in it. at least 2/3 of the population are unteachable for the management/engineering i want. i don't want applicants that look anything like normal. is that now illegal?
- fsckboy 3y agothe comment you are replying to is saying that if the data is representative of the world, you will then be termed biased because the people doing the labelling think the world is biased.
- reaperducer 3y agoWhat effects need an antidote? Which part of the article did you skip? Start with the part where AI hiring tools favor people named "Jared."
- ghiculescu 3y agoHumans do that too. Regulating AI won’t change that.
- constantly 3y agoI can tell a human what they’re doing and they can be aware of their bias and guard against it. This is part of the point of “unconscious bias” training. AI can’t do this. If you’re saying humans are consciously hiring people named Jared, they shouldn’t be allowed to provide hiring feedback.
- peterfirefly 3y agoAI would probably do it less than humans. If AI also does it, then Jareds probably really are better the employees. (Or the AI was used incompetently. That's always an option. Was AI the reason why US universities discriminated illegally against non-blacks and non-hispanics? I really doubt it.)
- djkivi 3y agoDo not tell Subway.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThe only way to do this is to whitelist acceptable input variables. Detecting bias is a meaningless exercise.
- rho138 3y ago[flagged]
- getmeinrn 3y agoTo those of you thinking of debating the above, remember, you cannot win the word game. The more you oppose someone telling you not to use a word, the more racist you appear, no matter the actual origins of the word in question. It simply doesn't matter. The only way to not be seen as a racist is to apologize and use whatever words they tell you to use.
- tekla 3y agoNo. The thing to do is ignore the dumb and irrational and continue to use normal words like "blacklist" and "whitelist"
- peddling-brink 3y agoI don’t think any rational people are offended by the word “blacklist”. I do think there is some validity to the change. Black lists are lists of bad things that need to be blocked or prevented, white lists are things that are good and allowed and wanted. That does create an unsavory connotation with the words themselves. Furthermore, as someone in an industry that used blacklist and whitelist extensively, noobs screw up those words all the time. It’s not a very clear word. Blocklist and allowlist are much less ambiguous.
- phatskat 3y agoThis is the correct response. The origins of the terms are less important here, and often people get hung up on them. Whitelist and blacklist are indeed ambiguous, and they also create negative connotations that could reinforce other, actually racist views and language, whether conscious or not.
- Oras 3y agoWhile I agree there should be regulations, there should be clear requirements instead of saying "bias". What does bias mean? To clarify, here are a few examples: 1. Gender bias There is a widely used keyword-based gender bias measurement based on a study from 2011. The research claims that job ads with higher levels have more masculine words. This is based on a pre-defined list of masculine and feminine words [0][1]. Another Harvard study stated that women would only apply for jobs if they meet 100% of the requirements, while men would apply for 60% or less [2]. 2. Racial bias This might be more related to video interviews or based on name, age, or address in resumes. For resumes, there are tools already to anonymise resumes to ensure the focus is on experience instead of the person. 3. Disability ADA (American Disability Act). According to this FAQ [3], "The ADA does not require employers to develop or maintain job descriptions. However, a written job description that is prepared before advertising or interviewing applicants for a job will be considered as evidence along with other relevant factors." The list could go on, with age, sexual orientation, native speaker or not ... etc. That's why the expectations have to be clearly defined. The law, as I understand it, will lock employers to their vendors as they will be required to keep data for auditing, which might incur more charges. [0] https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/static/documents/Gaucher-Friesen-Kay-JPSP-Gendered-Wording-in-Job-ads.pdf https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/static/documents/Gauc... [1] https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/about https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/about [2] https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless... [3] https://adata.org/faq/does-ada-require-employers-develop-written-job-descriptions#:~:text=The%20ADA%20does%20not%20require,along%20with%20other%20relevant%20factors https://adata.org/faq/does-ada-require-employers-develop-wri....
- dahart 3y agoThere are clear requirements that define bias. They’re in the Federal Equal Employment regulations. The bill cites them. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title42/html/USCODE-2010-title42-chap21-subchapVI-sec2000e-8.htm https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title42/html... https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-29/subtitle-B/chapter-XIV/part-1602?toc=1 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-29/subtitle-B/chapter-XIV...
- 23B1 3y agoThe companies that remove the human touch from hiring will rapidly wither and die, leaving the real talent for the rest of us who value people over process.
- rqtwteye 3y ago" the rest of us who value people over process" This group will keep shrinking though.
- donatj 3y agoI hear about job applications and interviews these days and they sound so daunting. My first job as a developer in 2006 I sat with the lead developer, had a very comfortable chat about things I had built, things I was interested in both related to programming and otherwise. Conversation turned to math and algorithms a little bit. He stepped out and came back with an offer. Whole thing took maybe 45 minutes. I honestly feel as far as interviews have gone, it did the best of honestly sizing me up as a person.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dntrkv 3y agoThe problem is that the modern tech interview process was created by large companies like Google. They needed an “unbiased”, scalable process to hire thousands of engineers with the main goal of reducing false-positives. Most companies don’t operate anywhere close to this scale and should not imitate this same hiring process.
- cudgy 3y agoMy inclination is that it is just a larger dumpster fire when performed by the larger companies. Poor tools don’t scale.
- musicale 3y agoWhat they've essentially produced might be slightly better than randomly accepting 5% of the applicants that make it to the interview stage. Probably not much better though, and much less efficient.
- paddw 3y agoThere should be a blanket ban for all jobs which are under ~100k.
- rovr138 3y agoA blanket ban on jobs? Or a blanket ban on these tools for jobs under 100k? I would like to see a distribution of salaries for jobs in NYC before saying ~100k
- neilv 3y ago> * Social media scrapers that collect data on applicants to compile personality profiles based on what they’ve found online > * AI-based chatbots that ask candidates questions about their qualifications, then decide if they’ll proceed in the interview process > * Algorithmic video platforms that have candidates answer interview questions on camera, record their replies, transcribe their responses, and analyze their vocal or facial patterns for subjective traits like “openness” or “conscientiousness” > * Logic games that purport to identify qualities like “risk-taking” or “generosity” Alright, which one of us monsters built any of this dystopian garbage? (We certainly are monsters with a sense of humor: see the example of deploying Kafkaesque automated snake oil gatekeeping to people's livelihoods... to seek "conscientiousness".)
- version_five 3y agoThe focus on bias is a transparent ruse imo. Implying that a dystopian unethical process is ok because it's the same for all demographics and therefore "ok" is absurd, and that's what most of the laws or proposed laws I've seen want to focus on. It's the typical modern grift of throwing up identity politics as a big smoke bomb to obscure way worse stuff.
- ebiester 3y agoOne? One? Buddy, it takes a village.
- fswd 3y agoon startupschool I met several groups that are trying this. One of them, when I asked for a follow up meeting about ethics, instead took a small write up I wrote to respond to their technical needs (...literally a two page write up) and immediately sent it to upwork. Three weeks later, lol, when that didn't work out, they contacted me again. I'm not going to disclose who it was, but I have a new policy now: Absolutely, under no circumstances will I consider working with former McKinsey partners.
- mooooooooooooo 3y agoMerely anecdotal but my worst experiences over the last year have been with startupschool companies - not saying they’re all bad (maybe I’ve been meeting the statistical minority that aren’t great) but as a part of the community I really expected better
- gumby 3y agoThese horrible processes remind me of applications that include IQ, “personality type” or other phrenological tests. Are those banned in any jurisdictions?
- lalaland1125 3y agoThis law appears to define fairness using "demographic parity", aka a model is assumed to be fair if equal fractions of each candidate group is selected. So if 20 women and 100 men apply, it would be considered unfair to accept 10 women and 20 men (as 10/20 != 20/100).
- dahart 3y agoWhere are you getting that? It does no such thing, please don’t concoct absurd stories. You can read the law in its entirety since it was linked in the article. [1] It doesn’t even try to define fairness or say a thing about demographics, it only requires a regular audit, and it relies entirely on already-existing Federal Equal Employment Regulations, which does not model demographics in equal fractions. [1] https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=4344524&GUID=B051915D-A9AC-451E-81F8-6596032FA3F9&Options=ID%7cText%7c&Search= https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=4...
- dyeje 3y agoI interviewed at a handful of AI powered recruiting software startups and universally they hand waved their way around any questions about bias, so glad to see NYC leading the charge here.
- xbar 3y agoNew York's "I'm bad at being an AI lawyer" law still needs some attention.
- cudgy 3y agoThink of the type of people willing to work at a company that entrusts the most critical action of a company, hiring of employees, to an artificial intelligence? It’s one thing to filter resumes with an ai, but using an ai to rate an in-person interview is dereliction of duty.
- exegete 3y agoI was a candidate in a HireVue interview a few years ago (mentioned in article) and it was a bad experience. I would get prompted with a question and then record myself answering the question (all inside their software), knowing that were using some kind of "AI" analysis on my responses. I didn't actually get to speak with a real person during that interview stage. I did make it to the next stage but thankfully found another job not at that company.
- sershe 3y agoOne of my favorite jokes on the topic is "What is the difference between an inquisitor and a bioethicist?" "An inquisitor deserves some forgiveness, he was the product of an unenlightened age and didn't know any better." I guess I'd have to generalize it from bio- to also apply to tech now.
- Nellyz 3y ago[dead]