Kairus
Posthuman Recruiting – A virtual jobcoach
Video on Screen
Basement
Continuous
Part of Cooking and Repairing the Algorithm Talk.
Over the past year, artist duo KairUs has explored AI's impact on employment, focusing on AI tools used by job seekers and recruiters. Companies are excited about AI's potential, which promises to de-bias hiring decisions and enhance recruiting efficiency. Resume screening software, video interview analysis, and augmented corporate training are now part of the HR professional's AI toolkit.
While these technologies may simplify recruiting for HR, EU policymakers have recognized AI-augmented employment as a high-risk category. However, AI's use in recruiting remains opaque and unregulated, with legislation lagging behind. This has spurred a consulting industry in which influencers, aiming for profit, offer tips to bypass AI rankings and profiling.
The virtual job coaches captures KairUs' artistic research, including experiments using popular models such as ChatGPT-4o, Claude 3, Llama 3.1 or Mixtral and generative media assets to optimize performance for the non-human in recruiting. The work is research-in-progress and a part of a longer engagement in AI recruitment, made possible through an EU-funded EMAP fellowship at m-cult in Helsinki.
KairUs is also part of Cooking and Repairing the Algorithm Talk.
KairUs is a collective of two artists Linda Kronman (Finland) and Andreas Zingerle (Austria). Their practice based research is closely intertwined with their artistic production, adopting methodologies used by anthropologists and sociologist, their artworks are often informed by archival research, participation observations and field research. Besides the artworks they publish academic research papers and open access publications to contextualize their artworks to wider discourses such as data privacy & security, activism & hacking culture, disruptive art practices, electronic waste and materiality of the internet.
KairUs has been awarded the Outstanding Artist Awards 2022 by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture.