Tlingit artist warns AI hiring tools are already screening out job seekers of color

Citing a Stanford headline that read "AI hiring tools can yield racial bias," Tlingit photographer and Boise State University professor emeritus Larry McNeil warned a Sealaska Heritage Institute audience Tuesday that the tools are already in wide use. "So many businesses, schools, governments, and organizations are using AI to evaluate applicants," he said. "If you're looking for a job, this could translate to being out of work for a very long time if you're not white."

McNeil framed his talk not as a wholesale condemnation of AI but as a call for critical engagement. He said he wanted to approach the subject "not negative, but with a critical eye," and noted he had been using AI tools himself for about a decade. He acknowledged AI's potential benefits, including its use in medical research, while arguing the technology needs guardrails. "AI is kind of like this drunken car, you know, going 200 miles an hour down a busy street, and there's no guardrails or very little guardrails," he said.

McNeil's lecture at SHI's Clan House in Juneau also addressed AI's threat to creative fields. While serving on faculty admissions committees, he said he spotted AI-written artist statements among applicants. "Applications that were easily identifiable as being written by artificial intelligence. No human wrote those submissions, you know. And so we faculty, we didn't know what to make about that, you know, at first going, wait a second, this is about creativity and these students are using AI to write these really critical statements. And that was not okay," he said. He urged artists and students to write their own materials, calling authenticity a critical differentiator.

On formline art, SHI underwater anthropologist Kelly Monteleone noted that an artist "can manipulate form line by 1/16 of an inch and it matters." McNeil agreed that AI lacked that precision. "It's balance and AI can't do that," he said. "I don't think AI has the ability to really do maybe what we could call is a proper form line. At least I haven't seen it yet." AI-generated attempts he had seen the previous year "looked like it was cartoons, you know, and it just didn't get it."