Currently, millions of people are searching for jobs, and securing employment in the AI era often feels more daunting than ever before. This is why the emergence of AI avatars conducting job interviews via one-on-one video calls—posing questions and evaluating your responses—has sparked considerable discussion and controversy. Several companies are driving the growth of AI-led interviews, including CodeSignal, Humanly, Eightfold, and others. According to the creators of these AI tools, a key advantage is that they enable companies to consider nearly every applicant for a given role, rather than just a select few, at least during the initial interview stage. Some proponents argue these tools are much less biased because they focus solely on analyzing answers, rather than other visual cues in the video.

However, as has been widely discussed, creating a truly bias-free AI system is unattainable, since these models are trained on vast amounts of internet data that inherently contain sexism, racism, and other prejudices. For this video, I tested three different AI interviewers myself for a variety of jobs—some designed specifically for this experiment based on my current role, and others being real job listings at Vox Media. While a few platforms felt relatively natural, I found myself wishing for a human interviewer every time. Watch the video to see how my experience unfolded.