Using deepfakes to 10x our investor's outreach to recruit our Sr Designer | Hacker News Reader

Using deepfakes to 10x our investor's outreach to recruit our Sr Designer

numero.ai

16 pointsbrianforde9 comments

A few comments here labelling this as impersonal, creepy or unethical. Full disclosure, I know the Numero team and we work with them, but I'd like to offer a different point of view.

It seems to me that the main point of this is to show off attention to detail, creativity and tongue-in-cheek messaging when applied to the hiring process, to attract candidates who'd do the same.

Given that the lists of 1,000 were combed through manually, with at least some receiving personalized messages, it seems at the very least a little more personal than your standard hiring process, and certainly no more creepy.

I can see why people might not like deepfakes being made light of, but that seems like a pretty nuanced issue and not something I'd immediately call 'unethical'. The main things for me are that (a) the people being deepfaked are involved in the process and (b) it's made extremely clear that the videos are faked.

Overall I'd say that the standard issues of fake-personalization or deepfakes revolve around something pretending to be more real or personalized than it actually is. Given that the entire goal of this is to show off how they stitched together tech to produce something the audience would find cool, it clearly isn't trying to fool anyone - in fact, surely doing so would defeat the whole point.

I didn't see an ethical problem with it. What prompted my comment below was that it was touted as a personalized service in the article when really it felt less personal than regular recruiting (and as you point out, there was a more thoughtful process of finding people in the first place, but then they got the fake videos + automated task to do).

It's equivalent in my mind to sending a form email that begins "Hello, $name". It's personalized in a technical sense but it's not personal. But not unethical either. On the ethics front I'd be more concerned about asking potential candidates to do some task - critique the website or whatever it was, without having any real skin in the game on the side of the hiring company. I don't agree with this kind of one-sided screening.

The way I read the article is that they created what I would consider an extremely impersonal hiring process - sent automatically generated videos to candidates, made them do a test and record some responses without actually talking to them, and then wrote an article about how "personal" it was.

It's pretty normal for real people in a company to reach out to candidates and talk to them personally. This is the opposite of that, somehow presented as being personal.

Hi! Yep, I can see that point of view. We've been the recipients of a lot of drip campaigns from recruiters and CEOs and those are mostly ignored and impersonal as well. That's why we're trying something different. Many of the personalized pages actually do have a personalized message we wrote about why we reached out to them. We've had a lot of positive feedback from candidates replying to Alexis and talking with him over DM but also appreciate your take!

This is creepy in the best case (which would cause me to ignore the recruiting email) and ethically dubious in the worst case (which would also cause me to ignore the recruiting email, but also call out the company on social media for doing so).

This blog post mostly makes me think less of both the startup and the investors. Deepfakes are a delicate issue and this post treats them more as a fun opportunity.

Totally agree about deepfakes being a delicate issue. That's why we labeled the video as being synthetically generated so there wouldn't be any confusion. It's more of a novelty. I appreciate how you might think less of us -- but we do think deepfakes can we used in fun and interesting ways as long as 1) the person being generated has agreed to it and 2) you're clear with how you label the video so the public or the recipient knows the difference. We did both because we share your concerns.

After reading this post I'm now very suspicious about the ethical foundations of this company. Why would anyone work at a company that tried to trick them into thinking someone like Alexis Ohanian made a personal video for them when in fact it was generated by a machine and was as impersonal as it could possibly be?

Hi! Really appreciate the feedback and the concern. That's why we labeled the video as being synthetically generated so there wouldn't be any confusion -- more like a novelty like deepfakes used for Messi https://www.messimessages.com/us/index.html and others. We've had a lot of positive feedback from candidates replying to Alexis and talking with him over DM but totally understand your point of view.

Lol I think its more funny thinking any of these guys will really make a difference in a candidates decision process.

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