Experience what it's like to be interviewed by an artificial intelligence HR in a world of gamified work and total surveillance.
An Interview with ALEX
Interactive experience in the browser, 2020
Carrie Sijia Wang
Created with support from the Mozilla Creative Media Awards
“An Interview with ALEX” is a 12-minute, playable experience in the browser that engages the audience in a job interview with ALEX, a powerful artificial intelligence HR employed by a speculative tech giant called “Open Mind.” The project is meant to criticize the present by speculating about the future. Through a science-fiction lens, the experience reveals how companies can use gamification as a tool of control, exploit technology to veil the true purpose of a job and extract the maximum amount of labor from its workers.
Initiation Phase: ALEX evaluates the candidate’s speaking voice.
Initiation Phase: The candidate is asked to smile as big as possible.
Gameplay: While playing the mini game, the candidate is distracted by the conversations of the “mentors” and the news headlines at the bottom of the interface.
Break Time: After each round of gameplay, the candidate is asked to take a 30-second break by staring at digitally-generated nature on the screen.
Q&A: ALEX asks the candidate intimate questions and measures how positive their tone is. (The questions are designed based on “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.”)
Results: Data collected from the candidate is fed into an obscure algorithm. A “State of Mind Index” is calculated to determine whether the candidate is a good fit for the company.
