Why Does the AI Say That I Am Too Far Away from the Job Market?

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being deployed in various domains such as healthcare (Qayyum et al., 2021), finance (Dastile, Celik & Potsane, 2020) and public welfare (Saxena et al., 2020; Carney, 2020), there is a growing need for understanding how stakeholders are affected by AI (Vaassen, 2022) and how to design and present explanations of AI-based decisions in ways that humans can understand and use (Miller, 2019). This paper contributes to these efforts by examining an AI-based decision-support system (DSS) launched by the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES) in 2020. Specifically, the study investigates to what extent the studied system enables affected jobseekers to understand the basis of AI-assisted decisions, to negotiate or contest dispreferred decisions, and to use the AI as a tool for increasing their job chances.