Deepfakes and impostors: the brave new world of AI jobseeking

“It’s a strange new world out there” for hiring managers, said Brit Morse in Fortune. Just ask Dawid Moczadło, the cofounder of Vidoc Security Lab, whose footage of a weird Zoom call with a job applicant recently went viral after he posted it on LinkedIn. During the interview, the candidate’s face blurred and glitched repeatedly. Suspecting that the candidate was using an AI filter to disguise his appearance, Moczadło asked him to hold his hand in front of his face, to disrupt the filter. The request was repeatedly ignored, so he terminated the interview.

Moczadło’s experience is far from unique. According to a survey in March, around 17% of hiring managers in the US have encountered candidates using deepfake technology in video interviews. It seems to be a particular problem in IT. One executive recently found that, out of 827 applications for a software job, about 100 were attached to fake identities. Some bogus applications are from those trying to boost their income; others, more worryingly, are North Korean IT workers targeting sensitive company data.