Julia Stoyanovich comments on NYC bill to rein in AI hiring tools
A bill passed by the city council in early November would ban employers from using automated hiring tools unless a yearly bias audit can show they won’t discriminate based on an applicant’s race or gender. It would also force makers of those AI tools to disclose more about their opaque workings and give candidates the option of choosing an alternative process — such as a human — to review their application.
Julia Stoyanovich, an Institute Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU Tandon who directs the NYU Center for Responsible AI, offered input on the bill when it was still being shaped. She said the best parts of the proposal are its disclosure requirements to let people know they’re being evaluated by a computer and where their data is going.
“This will shine a light on the features that these tools are using,” she said.
But Stoyanovich said she was also concerned about the effectiveness of bias audits of high-risk AI tools — a concept that’s also being examined by the White House, federal agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and lawmakers in Congress and the European Parliament.
“The burden of these audits falls on the vendors of the tools to show that they comply with some rudimentary set of requirements that are very easy to meet,” she said.
