NYC Will Regulate AI In Hiring

New York City is about to make waves and become the first U.S. city to roll out a regulation on AI tools in the recruitment process — Local Law 144. As part of the new law, HR teams must be aware of potential AI-related biases, while also giving job seekers a heads-up on when they are being evaluated by these tools. However, the new law has met with some skepticism.

What’s going on:

New York City is on the brink of making history as the first U.S. municipality to initiate a regulation on AI tools in hiring.

With the implementation of Local Law 144 in the near future, HR departments must review their AI recruitment systems for possible bias and alert job seekers when such tools are being utilized.

Why it matters:

The current labor law doesn’t have any regulations on the rapidly growing AI hiring tech, and that’s an issue. Suppliers of these machines claim they’re more impartial than humans, yet machine learning algorithms are often reproducing pre-existing prejudice, according to Fast Company.

The danger of AI isn’t necessarily that it’s more prejudiced than humans, but its decisions are more likely to be out of reach for accountability.

How it’ll impact the future:

“We’ve seen this happening in California, we’ve seen this happening in New York, where vendors were specifically lobbying weak frameworks to tackle automated employment decision tools, under which they can operate and sell their tools in an easy way without providing the guardrails that are actually needed. It allows AEDTs to have more or less free rein in the city, kind of giving a rubber stamp to their deployment,” said Daniel Schwarz, a policy researcher at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Advocates have pointed out that not only is Local Law 144 a missed opportunity, but also that, being the first of its kind, the New York City AI recruitment regulations will establish a disappointingly imperfect standard for other regulations to come.