A comedian fed The Lion King’s plot into an AI job interview. The bot bought the whole thing.

A growing number of companies now put candidates in front of an automated recruiter before any human sees the application. The bot asks about your background, your mistakes, and what you learned. It responds with encouragement, and it takes notes. Comedian Graham Dot Zip (@grahamdotzip) decided to find out how closely the software actually listens by telling an AI screener the story of The Lion King. He has been straightforward about how his viral AI interview videos work after Lead Stories fact-checked one of them in October, when he emailed the site’s editor-in-chief to say the videos are “staged, but not scripted.” He sets up the scenario, and the bot improvises every word it says in response. In a September video that has pulled more than 740,000 views, the automated recruiter introduced herself as Max, a talent partner for the role. She complimented his résumé and asked him to talk about himself. He said he’d spent most of his career in the family business. She asked about an early mistake he’d learned from the hard way. He said it was pivotal. An uncle who had been pushed out of the family business invited him to a one-on-one meeting. There was an incident involving wildebeest. Then his father died saving him. “I am so sorry to hear that,” Max said. She asked what he did after leaving the business. He said he spent several years in a relatively unstructured role with two new associates and that he’d adopted their operational philosophy of no responsibilities, no worries. “It sounds like it was a really valuable shift in perspective for you,” Max said. He explained how he decided to go back. “It wasn’t an easy decision for me, but I consulted some external advisors, and I had a brief conversation with my late father, and ultimately, I decided the best thing for me and for the business was for me to return to it.” Max didn’t ask about the conversation with his late father, but she did ask for two references. He noted that one of them had been killed by the other. By the end, she wanted to know what he’d taken from all of it. “I had one big learning [experience], which is to always ask for an agenda before a one-on-one, particularly when it’s taking place in the canyon.” Because nothing Max says was written for her, the bot’s earnestness is what makes the bit funny. She heard a man describe a murder in a canyon, a stint living with a meerkat, and a consultation with a dead parent, and the only thing she wanted to know was what he’d learned from it. Commenters also noticed the avatar losing the thread visually. “What’s really funny to me is that the AI widens her eyes while she emphasizes how hard it sounds, but because he interrupts during this, she spends the next minute with her eyes just stuck wide, not matching her gestures and voice anymore,” one wrote. Another had a takeaway of their own. “My new line when someone drops a bomb: ‘That sounds like a significant event.’” You can follow Graham (@grahamdotzip) for more entertaining videos.