Job interviews are stressful enough — but throw in a glitchy AI recruiter, and you’ve got a full-blown digital nightmare.
TikTok user Ken @its_ken04 is going viral after her job interview at a Stretch Lab in Ohio spiraled into the bizarre when the AI interviewer, powered by startup Apriora, malfunctioned and repeated the phrase “vertical bar pilates” 14 times in 25 seconds.
“I thought it was really creepy and I was freaked out,” she told 404 Media in a recent interview.
“I didn’t find it funny at all until I had posted it on TikTok, and the comments made me feel better,” she added.
“I was very shocked. I didn’t do anything to make it glitch, so this was very surprising.”
Apriora, a Y Combinator-backed startup, touts its AI platform as a way to “hire 87% faster” and “interview 93% cheaper” by conducting multiple interviews simultaneously using bot recruiters.
But for Ken, the encounter was more “Black Mirror” than breakthrough.
“It was genuinely so creepy and weird,” she captioned her viral May 2 TikTok.
“Please stop trying to be lazy and have AI try to do YOUR JOB!!!” she continued. “It gave me the creeps so bad.”
The unsettling encounter struck a chord on TikTok, where other users shared their horror stories of AI-powered job hunts.
“A company tried to send me to an AI interview for an HR position … Why would I want to work HUMAN resources for a company that won’t even dignify me with human interaction???” one commenter wrote.
Another added, “I applied to a job today that had an AI interview and immediately closed the window, cause if they’re not taking the time to interview me, I’m not taking the time to try to work there.”
This isn’t the first time AI’s takeover of the job market has left job seekers rattled.
As previously reported by The Post, nearly half of Gen Z job hunters say their degrees have already been rendered useless by generative AI like ChatGPT.
According to a report from Indeed last month per CIO Dive, 49% of Gen Z job seekers feel their college education has lost value in the workforce.
For millennials, it’s 34%, and for boomers, just 20%.
In addition, nearly half — 44% — of Gen Z college grads say they’ve been turned off by interviews that didn’t mention a salary range, sometimes by flat-out ghosting the recruiter, according to Monster’s 2025 State of the Graduate Report.
“I will just decline,” Ken said bluntly to 404 Media. “If another company wants me to talk to AI, I’m not doing it again.”
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