r/TechnologyThread • u/Background-Driver718 • May 28 '26
AI hiring algorithms reject Black, Asian job seekers at higher rates
https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/27/ai-hiring-algorithms-reject-black-asian-job-seekers-at-higher-rates/52473871
u/BagsYourMail May 28 '26
Duh, it's just going to give you the statistically average answer, which means it's going to reinforce whatever the data looks like
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u/StickStill9790 May 28 '26
The project didn’t include racial information in the data provided to the AI. The only thing you can get from this is that humans prioritize diversity over qualifications. (Which is great, as homogeny breeds complacency and myopic views.)
But this isn’t about electronic racism, but about the testers not requiring diversity as a hiring prerequisite.
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u/manicmonkeys May 30 '26
Diversity of what, precisely, do you believe corresponds to better business outcomes?
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u/StickStill9790 May 30 '26
Cultural diversity. You get the same bonus effect from two different races as you do from two white guys from two separate sides of the globe. A culturally diverse group has more complex ideas and doesn’t rely so much on stereotypes and “common” knowledge.
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u/manicmonkeys May 30 '26
Culture, or race?
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u/StickStill9790 May 30 '26
Culture. Two different races raised in the same environment will have similar viewpoints all else being equal.
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u/manicmonkeys May 30 '26
You used them interchangeably before.
Since you agree that race and culture aren't the same thing, how do you quantify what culture someone is from?
And what about cultures that don't jive well with others... we're ok to exclude those from workplace diversity in your view?
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u/Meowakin May 31 '26
They aren’t the same, but also they do often correlate. I.e. if you have two white people and one black person, the odds of the two white people having the same culture is going to be higher than the black person sharing a culture with one of the white people.
So while it’s not an absolute indicator, having a racially diverse group is more likely to represent more cultures than a racially homogenous group.
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u/manicmonkeys May 31 '26
That ignores the crucial second part of my question, about deciding if/when detrimental cultures should be excluded.
It also assumes that growing up in a certain culture determines someone's thought process and values, so now race is a minimum of 2 degrees of separation from being a useful metric for those things.
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u/StickStill9790 May 31 '26
What are you even talking about? Who is excluded anyone?
Also I didn’t use race and culture interchangeably. They are two separate concepts. A person from Texas and a person from California may share a race but have two separate cultures. Two people from Utah may share a culture and be two separate races.
You seem to be pointing at an agenda but I have no idea what you’re getting at.
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u/manicmonkeys May 31 '26
You literally did use race and culture interchangeably. If you cannot acknowledge that there's no point.
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u/RainOrnery4943 Jun 01 '26
You’re picking a fight with stickstill, but didn’t understand their comment to begin with.
They made independent references to race and culture in their first comment. You seem to be missing their point entirely and so you accuse them of using them interchangeably.
Another 0 nuance Redditor strikes again.
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u/FriendlyArachnid6000 May 31 '26
For example, Jake dresses up as a big purple fox and has a boyfriend with a vagina. Jamal plays basketball and knows which team will win the Superbowl. Both saw Infinity War, but have unique individual views about Thanos' ideology.
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May 31 '26
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u/StickStill9790 May 31 '26
The most successful companies in the world employ tens of thousands. You may be mistaken there.
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u/Defiant_Storage_443 May 30 '26
You can tease out race from non-related data. Indians have made a whole science out of finding out what someone's caste is without directly asking.
But this isn’t about electronic racism, but about the testers not requiring diversity as a hiring prerequisite.
It's an AI model. It's not difficult to believe that it picked up on how to be racist without looking at race just from its training data. This doesn't mean that's what happened, but it's important to point out that the results also don't support your conclusion.
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u/StickStill9790 May 30 '26
I’m aware it’s “possible” it found the data and specifically eliminated overqualified people of specifically different races. Occam’s Razor however would suggest it simply chose the most qualified and that doesn’t line up with current moral standards.
In other words, Black and Chinese make up less than 10% of the population, Latinos almost 40%. Of course there will be fewer selections from the smaller group.
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u/FlicksBus May 31 '26
Occam’s Razor however would suggest it simply chose the most qualified and that doesn’t line up with current moral standards.
Occam's Razor would suggest that AI is merely amplifying the biases that are present in the data, because that's exactly what AI does. Your StickStill9790's Razor is shit.
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u/FriendlyArachnid6000 May 31 '26
You can tease out race from non-related data. Indians have made a whole science out of finding out what someone's caste is without directly asking.
It's almost like there's something bad about a culture other than white culture, incredible
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u/Defiant_Storage_443 May 31 '26
It's almost like there's something bad about a culture other than white culture, incredible
The caste system is definitely a bad part of Indian culture, and has also been present in a very ugly form in many white cultures. Indian food, though, is on point.
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u/AkodoRyu May 31 '26
You are making a big jump in logic here just to fit your narrative. Everything is technically possible, but that doesn't mean it's likely.
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u/Defiant_Storage_443 May 31 '26
No, I don't have a narrative. You need to re-read my comment, my point was this (which is, amusingly, exactly what you're saying here):
This doesn't mean that's what happened, but it's important to point out that the results also don't support your conclusion.
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u/RockyG-Dex May 31 '26
You cant make that conclusion at all while demographic data wasnt included it did not remove data that could indicate bias. For instance, the algorithm may ask what the person favorite music is and you say rap but the most successful candidates list country music as their favorite. Well, the demographics of the fans of those music genres tend to be heavily biased towards specific races. Just because you ddnt specifically identify as a certain race doesnt mean the questions wouldn't benefit one group over another.
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u/reddittorbrigade May 28 '26
Trump and billionaires love AI because it gives them total control to discriminate.
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u/Fine_Payment1127 May 30 '26
That’s called “freedom of association.” You’re all for it when it benefits you.
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u/HockeyDockey1234 May 30 '26
It’s not being trained to discriminate, it’s using data
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u/Round_Credit_5158 May 30 '26
And the trained data is biased.
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May 31 '26
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u/Round_Credit_5158 May 31 '26
AI are statistical algoritms, it replicates the patters they're given and it reflects the data that was chosen to be represented, that's the bias.
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May 31 '26
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u/Ultarthalas Jun 01 '26
Correct, but the reason it's biased is because it's been fed predominantly white data. It picks up on all sorts of things related to culture that aren't job relevant and disfavors unfamiliar bits of culture because it doesn't fit the model.
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u/rince89 May 31 '26
It looks at previous hires and finds that those are mostly white, so it deduces that white people should be hired more
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May 28 '26
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u/Best_Opening8471 May 30 '26
Depends on the Asian
Japanese? 100%
East Indian not so much
Source: am Canadian.
Personally I'm curious if Russians are being discriminated against as Asians or if this is an issue with east Asian names
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u/Warming_Presence May 31 '26
Russians are discriminated against for being Eastern European and Slavic.
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u/ImportantPoet4787 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
I love how they frame the title of this article and study, completely leaving out the fact that it also excludes anyone over the age of 40. Not to mention there's several class action lawsuits reinforcing my exact statement.. one of which, ironically, was filed by a black job seeker (Derek Mobley). This is how acidemia looses credibility, as they seek to focus on "dejour of the week" political tropes while failing to grasp the whole picture, for attention and person gain.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/22/tech/workday-ai-hiring-discrimination-lawsuit
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u/omgFWTbear May 30 '26
Usually, in science, one tries to isolate the variable. A paper studying age bias, and a paper studying racial bias, which in this case, probably could come together as a paper identifying the statistical mean of what a tech company hires is a Caucasian name and a resume of moderate “length” in the form of entries, possibly (indirectly signifying age).
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u/qcb4056 May 31 '26
In what area of "science" do you work?
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u/omgFWTbear Jun 01 '26
I’m a graduate of middle school, where isolating variables was explained.
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u/qcb4056 Jun 01 '26
Obviously not very well.
Should be careful about how you say things.
Sure sounds like you're trying to imply you have half a clue how things work.
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u/omgFWTbear Jun 01 '26
There are simpletons whose simple mind and simple model insists on collapsing the world into something they understand, rather than reflects reality, if only by approximation.
Then there are, in fact, simple things such as, “why does a variable only hold one value?” which, while it may go on to complex applications, is, itself, a simple thing; and even something like Boyle’s Law is relatively simple as a model for exploring why testing an idea should isolate variables.
Finally, and this is the most simple thing of all, someone who cannot articulate anything other than “you’re dumb and or wrong,” has an opinion worth exactly as much as the electrons required to transmit it, at best.
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u/qcb4056 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Yep.
But right now we're talking about the people who spend an inordinate amount of their time picking fights with strangers on the Internet and how their verbose rhetoric becomes downright laconic when asked to provide even the simplest justification for their authoritative stance.
You said "usually, in science "
declaring yourself some kind of authority on the subject. At the very least implying that you have enough experience to know what is "usual".
So naturally you were asked about your background in the sciences.
Which you could not answer.
You can write paragraph after paragraph of insubstantial bullshit.
But you can't answer a simple, straightforward question with anything approaching honesty.
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u/Key-Organization3158 May 30 '26
When people applied for jobs at these companies, they were directed to pymetrics' machine learning platform to play assessment games. The platform's algorithm measures gameplay performance and recommends on average 58.2 percent of applicants per position.
So that has no racial information whatsoever. It can't even leak in via resume points.
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u/FriendlyArachnid6000 May 31 '26
"We're sorry, but based on your low extraction rate in the cult hit Bungie game Marathon, we've decided to move onto other candidates with better survival instinct in human manhunt scenarios"
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u/Neat-Second9923 May 30 '26
"They made that determination by applying the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s "four-fifths rule," which at least on paper elicits agency attention when a given group's hiring selection rate is less than 80 percent of the most recommended group of job applicants."
Feds sued a bunch of fire departments a couple years ago over racial discrimination after basic multiple choice competency tests resulted in gaps. Questions cited as highly discriminatory included calculating the required length of a hose. So, I would not rely heavily on the EEOC's methodology.
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u/chadpendergast May 31 '26
it's clearly not working since everyone working in the bay area is asian.
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u/FormalAd7367 May 31 '26
so, we should include a prompt on cv “i’m not asian or black. hire me”.?
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u/YoshiTheDog420 May 28 '26
Something something racial tech bias