How much would you bet that human interviewers' opinions of a candidate after a video interview wouldn't be affected if they were visibly in a room full of books? Or if they wore glasses, or had a painting hanging on the wall, or the various other things the researchers found made a difference to the AI's assessment?
To be clear, I am super-skeptical about the ability of AI systems to do a good job of judging an interviewee's personality from a short video clip. But (1) this seems obviously to be a really hard problem, and one that couldn't even have been attempted in 1970, and (2) I am also pretty skeptical about the ability of human interviewers to do it.
> "But (1) this seems obviously to be a really hard problem, and one that couldn't even have been attempted in 1970"
Apollo 11 landed on the moon July 20th 1969. You think that didn't take a degree of "AI" and "ML"? Or maybe we just had a different name for these things back then...
I think that's just a matter of 1. resources and 2. risk tolerance.
1960s USA had a less superficial political culture, so was more willing to tolerate PR-sensitive risks in pursuing major technological achievements, and it could allocate a much larger proportion of GDP to the Apollo program, as government directed social welfare spending consumed a far smaller share of GDP: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-...
Its easy to point at the bookshelf example and say "Haha AI is stupid", but its actually quite impressive. One could easily argue that most human interviewers have similar bias, and that it can detect such complex signals (books, glasses etc) IS impressive.
The problem is this case is the data and/or wrong objectives, but the "AI" here has a lot of awareness, just on the "wrong" signals.
I don't see how this is relevant. Computers in the 1970 had no situational awareness about people interviewing for jobs. So yes, that software might be crap, it still has infinitely more awareness.
what even is "infinitely more awareness?" is that an actual metric? Computers today have exactly as much awareness as they had in the 1970s, situational or otherwise, which is none. The algorithm in question does not know what a bookshelf is, does not know what a job interview is and it does not know how the two relate. It correlates a bunch of pixels and creates the illusion of having awareness, but this is an anthropomorphization and nothing more.
To be clear, I am super-skeptical about the ability of AI systems to do a good job of judging an interviewee's personality from a short video clip. But (1) this seems obviously to be a really hard problem, and one that couldn't even have been attempted in 1970, and (2) I am also pretty skeptical about the ability of human interviewers to do it.