Since AI makes everyone's resume look perfect, bosses are going back to judging people by their social class instead of their talent.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
<p><span>Signaling Without Signals: Arena Choice Under AI Homogenization</span></p>
SSRN · 6339538
The Takeaway
When AI homogenizes output, traditional performance signals lose their ability to distinguish skill. This forces evaluators to rely on their prior beliefs about a candidate's social origin, potentially making AI a tool that reinforces the class-based glass ceiling by making individual merit impossible to prove.
From the abstract
When AI homogenizes output, traditional performance signals lose their informational value, and evaluators revert to prior beliefs about social origin, reproducing the condition for statistical discrimination through a different mechanism. We show that individuals respond by strategically choosing costly evaluation arenas that AI cannot homogenize, producing a Spence-type signaling game. We derive the Riley separating equilibrium in closed form under a broad class of cost functions and show that