Can you ethically impose your AI self on your employer?
It
is a fact of life that you, the employer, should never take anything on a
prospective employee’s Curriculum Vitae. If not outright lies, it would always
have exaggerations. If the applicant’s experience is from here to there, you
would see in her CV experience from “before here” to “after there.” If you used
Artificial Intelligence (AI), it would be “From Here to Eternity”!
As
per an article in the Trichy edition of The Hindu of January 29, 2025
entitled, “The changing character of the resume”, to be successful in
getting employed, one needs to, “present a compelling picture of oneself to the
potential employer.” So far so good.
But,
beyond? There is an unabashed slant towards Information and Communication
Technology, companies. How would I know? I hear it jiggling in the IT jargon
basket: hiring managers! Are there “Firing managers”? Do these two–hiring and
firing–managers talk to each other? It could not have not happened that a
candidate was hired, becoming an employee in the morning and fired in the
evening!
Why
would this happen? Because, the applicant was less than truthful in his
application. What did he do? He used AI. Why did he use AI? Because he was told
that the hiring manager in that company used AI in his vetting process and
further on. He, quite curious as he was, asked how AI would help him game the
AI used by the hiring manager.
It
was AIHiring manager v. AIApplicant!
This
is where the article in The Hindu comes in handy. The hiring manager
seeks “individuality and authenticity” in the new hire, and the AI in the hands
of the applicant dutifully provides the same!
Check
that. I will try to avoid “nothing but”tery, but I may not be able to do so. AI
does “nothing but” digging into the vast databases of the employees past and
present of this company and possibly doing so (illegally) of the competitors of
this company (here, we come to a conundrum, some sort of self-reference (?)–if
all are doing the same illegal stuff, doesn’t the illegal thing become legal?).
That is, individuality and authenticity are thrown out the window!
Individuality
must come from the individual and so must authenticity. One cannot buy either,
which is what the applicants would be doing if they were to engage AI to do
their dirty work. End of the twisting tale.
Yet,
there is perhaps more. There is a foghorn blaring about the oncoming spurt in
innovation. This claim passes by me. If AI does nothing original, what kind of
innovation can it spur? Only of the most marginal, which, again, everyone would
be on to in a flash. Such an innovation in the AI ecosphere (Oh, how I wanted
to use this particular jargon word that grates me to no end, just so my readers
too may get irritated!), would have the lifetime of a moth diving into the flames!
Where
does AI spring from? From the wellspring of the human mind interacting with its
environs. Would AI operate in an environment that is not the one in which humans
do? If it would not, how could it be called artificial? I have raised this
point in a supposedly intelligent set of people and none could understand me.
Indeed, one of them dismissed it as merely semantics. He did not realize that
if indeed it be semantics it is of the logical type and not lexical. If his
intelligence would spur AI, I pity the result!
If
AI were to breach the bounds of human environments, humans can have no control over
where AI goes and what it becomes capable of doing. It becomes Orwell’s
nightmare of the worst kind.
The
above is not a Cassandra’s prediction, only to be ignored. It is rather a
guideline for hiring managers to assess how intuitively, imaginatively and
impressively the applicant has used his AI skills in prostituting himself, just
to be employed.
Raghuram
Ekambaram
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