La quête de l’unicité. Sens, pratiques et intelligence artificielle dans le recrutement

The so-called « fourth wave of AI » has stimulated a scientific literature and media attention teeming with concerns about its effects on work. However, these researches are based on naïve visions of labour and technological progress that take no account of the socio-technical issues involved, or of the complexity and plasticity of practices, particularly work practices. In order to bring out the fact that working with these new tools involves more subtle transformations than the dichotomous precogitations of job creation/destruction, we propose to turn our attention to the lived meaning of work practices. In fact, this article delves in the framework of the ICENTRA project, which looks at several disciplines to document the user-experience of AI applications at work. However, it has a special methodological aim: by focusing on a case study of AI use in recruitment belonging to ICENTRA corpus, the article singles out the contribution of semiotics in such an endeavor. The chosen approach, based on the narrativity hypothesis, analyses the imaginary underlying the tool and its uses, shedding light on the designer’s ‘value promise’ and its reinterpretations/translations in the user narrative. The results suggest that the challenges of technological innovation should be redefined in terms of the cultural practices (in this case, of recruitment), and more generally invite researchers to move away from both technophobic and techno enthusiastic approaches that overlook the sociosemiotic networks surrounding the actors.