The Moral Use of AI

We can’t put the AI genie back in the lamp

February 2025

Moral question: a candidate applying for a job online hides secret prompts in his application letter. The prompts are designed to tell the screening software to recommend the applicant for the job.

Is this smart thinking, dishonest, fair game?

The question was raised by Chris Huffen earlier this week and I'm keen to know what you think?

It follows my poll showing that whilst there's lots of talk about AI, only half of people (in my admittedly small sample size) who use it? Or should it be that half of people are already using AI?

The application of ethical use of AI in recruitment is a biggie.

The government released its survey of public attitudes to data and AI recently and revealed that there's lots of concerns about algorithmic discrimination, as well as concerns about giving fair due to unconventional career pathways, or favouring elite universities. There's lot more angles to it.

And each week we have a new AI model unleashed - Grok 3, DeepSeek, the latest version of ChatGPT - and legislators are struggling to keep up. In fact rather than play catch-up they're falling behind as companies of all sorts and sizes rush to integrate AI into their workflows and propositions.

We can't put the AI genie back into the lamp. But how we co-exist (yes, I've anthropomorphised AI) with the genie is vital.