Ideal Behavior (2024)

Ideal Behavior is a media art project that addresses the ways AI affects the employment sector. IKEA as an internationally well-known employer has pioneered the use of AI in job recruiting. Thus, the company serves as a case study for media artists Andreas Zingerle and Linda Kronman as they test popular tricks and AI tools in order to optimize their performance for AI augmented employment processes. Will they succeed in matching the metrics of an ideal candidate? Can they pass the recruiting bot and get interviewed by a human?

Under scrutiny are claims that AI tools are fairer than human recruiter because of their ability to erase gender, race, ethnicity and age from the hiring process. By focusing on measuring skills and personality AI tools are marketed as an objective option to evaluate candidates effectively replacing human bias. However, identity is not a collection of attributes that can be switched off. Neither is de-biasing the decisions made by individual human recruiters a way to fix systematic problems of discrimination in working culture.

What AI recruiting tools do, is that they reflect longer histories of taxonomical sorting unveiling ideals about the hirable individual. Therefore, the artwork investigates how AI amplifies and reproduces ideal behavior when both recruiting and job seeking is increasingly automatized.

In the process of collecting different perspectives into a video installation, the collaborating artists engage with influencers who consult job-seekers with AI tips & tricks, IKEA employees, other job-seekers, HR-professionals, Headhunters, AI-developers and researchers.