Tiktok’s video of Glitchy AI interviews has been word-of-mouth in recent weeks, but don’t worry if you’ll need a job interview right away.
One user attending Freddie posted a video of an AI assistant named “Catherine Appleton” on May 3rd. As of Thursday, his video had 8.8 million views.
“Should I email them? I was expecting a real person,” he wrote in the caption.
Another Tiktok user named Ken shared a clip of her interview. The AI assistant repeated the phrase “vertical barpilates” in the loop.
Neither responded to requests for comment from Business Insider.
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“Titktok’s videos showing glitches and malfunctions could possibly be one of a rare, isolated incident,” said Sriram Iyer, assistant senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore Business School.
They “should not be considered a common phenomenon,” he added.
Tan Hong Ming, assistant director and senior lecturer at the NUS Business School’s analysis and operational office, said social media “spokes to amplify things.”
“It can make something look much more common than it actually is through repetition or virus sharing,” he said.
Tan, who also serves as a lead advisor to a Singapore-based AI recruiting company, said Loop Audio is “highly likely to be dramatized or re-enacted to promote engagement and share.” He said he has not come across this particular glitch in an AI interview, but the occasional breakdowns are not surprising.
Many companies use AI-driven recruitment tools that are often “wrappers around the same core model or API.”
Some of them may not use the latest or most stable version.
Unaizah Obaidellah, a senior lecturer specializing in AI at the University of Malaysia University of Malaya, said that inadequate or unrelated data could also be the perpetrator. If there are not enough relevant examples for the bots, their quality suffers.
She added that the incidents depicted in the video could reflect a greater competition to deploy AI faster than we were ready.
Increase in AI interviews
Emily DeJu, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper Business School, specializing in AI communication and etiquette, told BI earlier this week that video interviews with AI will likely become more common as companies try to streamline and automate their early employment stages.
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Whenever technology promises to save time and money and make everything faster, she said, “I pursue it by default — there’s a kind of inevitability to it.”
Despite what Tiktoks might propose, candidates aren’t necessarily turned off by the bot, said Iyer, who has worked for HR Tech for 20 years.
What should I do if my interview bot is malfunctioning?
The problems during AI interviews are not troublesome.
“Glitch can deprive the trust and make the recruitment process feel impersonal or unfair,” said Tan, especially if the company is not in advance about conducting AI interviews.
“They undermine the candidate’s experience,” he said, adding that employers need to “build strong fallback options,” and that these tools need to be closely monitored in actual settings.
“What feels like a time-saving solution otherwise can become a quiet and systematic issue,” he added.
For candidates, the key is not to panic.
In the case of an interview in an AI bot malfunction, Tan recommends emailing the hiring manager a screenshot or a recording of what happened.
“Candidates should offer a redo, assuming they are not postponed by the idea that they will be interviewed by the bot in the first place,” he said.
Unaizah, a graduate of the University of Malaya, said candidates can request feedback from the HR team on their interview performance.
If there was clear evidence, the interviews were not properly evaluated or reviewed by humans — she said she asked for in-person interviews if possible.
“If everything’s going to fail or your gut feelings aren’t, then it’s probably best to look for another company,” Uniser said. “A target company that prioritizes human-centered employment.”
