When You Apply for a Job Now, You’re Competing With Non-Human Entities

As if the job market weren’t already bad enough, applicants are now forced to compete with AI-generated employment seekers.

As CBS News reports, scam artists are using AI to cook up headshots and write fake résumés and sites to fit the specifics of a given job opening.

Sometimes, those AI scammers end up getting hired — and once they’re there, they can steal trade secrets and sabotage a company’s systems with malware.

A few months ago, Dawid Moczadlo, the co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Vidoc, posted a now-viral video on LinkedIn showing him interviewing a candidate who he realized was using some sort of AI filter to obscure their face.

Moczaldo asked the seemingly scamming candidate to put their hand in front of their face to see if it would “break” the deepfake filter. When the person refused, he ended the call immediately.

In an interview with CBS, the Vidoc cofounder said he felt a “little bit violated, because we are the security experts” — though ultimately, he was glad the scammer didn’t get further.

According to researchers Moczadlo spoke to after the incident, the phony applicant appeared to act in a similar way to North Korean hacker networks that create fake identities to work remote jobs in the United States. Though the incident is still being investigated, the Vidoc cofounder believes it could have been worse.

“We are really lucky that we are security experts,” Moczaldo said. “But for companies that have regular people like hiring managers or regular startup founders, it’s really hard for them to spot something like this.”

“Sometimes,” he continued, “it takes a hacker to find a hacker.”

Unfortunately, that was not the first time Vidoc had encountered an AI applicant. After it happened again, as seen in Moczadlo’s LinkedIn video, the company decided to change its hiring practices and now flies top candidates out to San Francisco for in-person interviews at Vidoc’s offices, complete with travel expenses covered and pay for the trial day of work.

While it’s great to know that employers are trying to filter out these AI scammers, it’s still pretty bad news for real people on the other end of hiring processes. Between companies laying off staff in hamfisted attempts to streamline their work with AI and generative phonies gumming up the application process, it appears that the rise of generative AI now has job applicants stuck between a rock and a hard place.

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