People who don't listen to music: "AI is going to replace all music"
People who don't read: "AI is going to replace literature"
People with no friends: "AI will replace all relationships"
People who don't practice law: "AI will replace all lawyers"
Do any of you do anything
I just had a deeply alarming 45 minute sync with our Talent Acquisition team regarding their new AI-driven resume screening tool.
They reported that the software's reduced our time-to-hire by 60% over the last month.
I asked them to walk me through the specific algorithmic parameters they established for filtering out unqualified applicants.
The HR manager smiled and said they just told the AI to optimize for digital natives with high runway potential and a youthful energy.
I stopped typing and asked her to run a demographic report on every single candidate the software's rejected since September.
The data showed a 100% rejection rate for any applicant who graduated college before the year 2010.
I explained that automating age discrimination doesn't make it suddenly legal, it just makes it highly scalable and incredibly easy to prove in court.
She seemed genuinely confused and argued that the AI made the decision, not her, so we're insulated from liability.
I had to explain that the EEOC doesn't currently accept the robot defense for federal civil rights violations.
I'm currently drafting a memo to halt all hiring until we manually review 4,000 resumes.
I’ll admit - i was sceptical about the idea of AI psychosis. Not the specific cases, which were all too believable, but about the scale. How much was this happening? And anyway wouldn’t better models make it go away?
Then I read a paper by Anthropic and the University of Toronto which has strangely received very little attention