Artificial intelligence can now help you in the job hunt
Landing a dream job takes time and often the right connections, but three Carnegie Mellon University students have found a way to personally reach out to hundreds of career recruiters in just seconds using artificial intelligence.
One of these students, Ilyas Bankole-Hameed, said, "The tool that we've built, HyperAI, is to specifically help people get the dream jobs and dream connections they so deeply desire."
For example, the students use the social media platform LinkedIn to help with the job hunt. AI uses natural language processing to understand English, recognizes profiles, then creates unlimited personalized messages in seconds.
They can then immediately send those messages out to different people to say different things.
"It's basically converting human language, especially English, converting that into something that the machines can understand, numbers, and then the machine is able to do something with it," Ranadeep Singh said. "So the system is able to convert those numbers into something else that's meaningful and then convert it back to English, which is what we understand."
Writing a great email to grab the attention of a hiring manager can make all the difference in jumpstarting your career. It's an art some people have trouble perfecting. It can take them hours to find the right words, tone and research about someone.
But with AI, the computer does the work for you.
"It's not the future in terms of replacing the workforce," Singh said, "but it is in the hands of workers to make them more efficient. Think of how we went from paper to computers at the workplace."
"I think it's very impressive every time I see AI, how quickly it's growing," Alex Li said.
Making the difference between a good impression and a great one — a skill that used to be attributed to the human connection — is now one artificial intelligence specializes in to get you in front of top company leaders.
"It's very, very difficult if you are a student," Bankole-Hameed said. "You don't have a lot of work experience, and you want to connect with someone at Google, someone at Microsoft for a specific internship. You have to know that recruiter is being bombarded daily with many messages from people with more experience than you."
So how is AI going to change the workforce?
"AI is definitely growing surprisingly quickly, and most workplaces are going to adopt it, and those who don't are likely to fall behind," Li said.
But there's another side of AI that creates caution. Virtual doppelgängers can portray themselves as one person but be another behind the keyboard.
"It's definitely dangerous," Bankole-Hameed said. "And this is why you need artificial intelligence engineers to do what they can to make sure that that kind of media is suppressed for people who aren't aware of it. Because you certainly can't beat a problem that you don't even know exists."
Students say AI engineers can spot a fake, technically. Humans can sometimes notice when a message doesn't have that genuine touch. But artificial intelligence is expanding, even creeping into the world of art.
"For an artist, you'll be doing creative design instead of drawing every single individual pixel," Li said.