Amazon scraps AI recruiting tool that turned into a misogynist
An experimental hiring tool was used to rate job candidates, but it learnt to penalise women
Amazon.com’s machine learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women. The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanising the search for top talent, said five people familiar with the effort. Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence (AI) to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars, much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said. “Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.” But by 2015, the company realised its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way. That is because Amazon’s com...
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