Chapter 26 Treat Human with Humanly

by Berk Şimsek

That was one of those days when I knew another of my applications would be rejected. I just didn’t know which one it was. Was it an application for the loan I’ve been trying to get for a while, or one of the jobs I’ve been trying to get into?

For a while, we have been struggling with the concept of ai rejection in the world, especially in our country, the USA. Almost all companies used artificial intelligence in their application evaluations. When you apply to the bank, ai decides the approval and amount of the loan and when you apply for a job, ai decides whether you will be accepted and your salary. Although it may seem like things got easier when you said it like that, it actually wasn’t like that at all. On the contrary, everything became more and more difficult. Especially if you are part of a discriminated community.

Artificial intelligence learns everything it learns by basing it on people’s knowledge and experience, therefore, artificial intelligence was also very discriminatory because people were discriminatory on many issues. For example, when a married couple applied for a loan, ai gave more loans to men than women. When a woman applied for a manager or senior job, her application was automatically eliminated by ai. Because the artificial intelligence automatically concluded that the man had more money, or matched a male figure with a managerial position. AI bias wasn’t just limited to women. You could have included any category of discrimination that you can think of. Your race, age, gender, marital status, orientation…

Things had obviously reached an unbearable point. Unless you are a white man, you have no chance of not being discriminated against. For this reason, we were seeing something related to this on social media every day, even though there was not a full protest. Everyone wanted to find support by sharing their experience of being discriminated against. However, the companies that caused this discrimination by using artificial intelligence in their companies did not make any explanation.

I think I was at the limit of my patience that day. I couldn’t handle another rejection. I was unemployed and broke for months. I entered my e-mails and yes, I was rejected again from both the jobs and loans I applied for. By the way, even if I applied for jobs far below my own status just to be approved, I was getting rejected. I just logged onto LinkedIn. Because I was wondering who they accepted instead of me. I would feel relieved if the accepted ones were more experienced than me, or equivalent to my experience. I was shocked by what I saw. The people who were accepted instead of me were all men and all were incomparably more inexperienced than me.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I became one of those who shared their experiences and raised their voices on Twitter. I explained my whole process with all the screenshots, documenting what I went through. My process, which I described with the hashtag #TreatHumanWithHumanly, started to receive intense interaction. I wasn’t a social media celebrity or a high-follower, but I was pretty prominent.

People were voicing their rebellion with the hashtag #TreatHumanWithHumanly. After a while, such a large crowd came together that it was impossible for the protest not to spill over to the streets on social media. People that took to the streets were protesting AI bias in front of the big banks and corporations. The protests were getting more and more crowded and more violent. Either they would stop using AI in their application review or we would bring their companies down.

After days of protests, companies that saw how determined and angry we were, released statements of apology one by one. They have now announced that evaluations will be made by people.

Yes, for now, we were able to take a step back and many of us got jobs again because we were treated humanely. But the fact that everything continues to be increasingly connected to artificial intelligence scares us. There is no guarantee that we will not be discriminated against again tomorrow. I hope future AI will not be biased.