Finding a job is already frustrating enough — the endless applications, cover letters, and long bouts of waiting for responses that might never arrive. Now it seems jobseekers will increasingly be forced to debase themselves even further by interviewing with glitchy, inhuman AI bots.
TikToks of folks interviewing with artificial intelligence-powered “interviewers” have gone viral recently. Now, before we go any further, it’s important to acknowledge that some of these TikToks are fake or labeled as some version of satire. But there are others that appear to be very real.
A detailed report from Slate over the weekend, for instance, talked with folks who said they’d been forced to interview with an AI bot. One such example was Kendiana Colin, who posted a viral TikTok showing an AI bot that couldn’t stop saying “vertical-bar pilates” during an interview for a job at a stretching studio. It is genuinely creepy and darkly funny.
“It was very disrespectful and a waste of time,” Colin told Slate.
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She’s hardly alone in her experience. Another viral video appears to show an interview bot getting stuck in a loop of saying “when, when, when” and “let’s circle back.” There is something fitting about the bot getting stuck in a loop of corporate speak. That TikTokker told Newsweek this was an actual interview for a real job and not satire.
If you peruse around TikTok you’ll see lots of other AI interviews of unclear veracity. But it’s interesting that AI interviews have become such a thing online that now they’re being parodied or faked to draw eyeballs.
This video, for instance, went viral despite being posted by an account clearly labeled as satire.
The thing is, the satire isn’t far from the real thing. Despite that viral TikTok being fake, it’s pretty much the same as the real pilates interview. And there are companies out there selling AI bots as hiring solutions. The Slate report noted the pilates “interviewer” was from a start-up called Apriora.
So next time you apply for a job, just know you might have to suffer through a glitchy AI bot to earn that offer.
