AI-Inferred Personality Profiles of Occupations: Implications for Career Counselling and AI Literacy
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Artificial Intelligence, Occupations, Personality Inference, Generative Artificial Intelligence, AI Literacy, Personality, Career Counseling, Gender Bias
Abstract
This study examines whether artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots or “AIs” provide accurate personality profiles of occupations for career-exploring students and whether these profiles contain gender stereotypes. Although it is well known that AIs contain inaccurate data and gender stereotypes, similar to the human linguistic data it is based on, this is the first study of inaccuracies and bias in AI-inferred personality traits associated with occupations. GPT-4, Claude 3, and Gemini 1.0’s inferences of Big Five personality traits of 92 occupations were compared with human expert analysis of the Big Five personality traits important for these jobs, derived from the O*NET Work Styles (Wilmot & Ones, 2021). Ten of 15 analyses of variance comparing AI and expert ratings were significant (p < .05), indicating selective accuracy. We also found seven significant oneway analyses of variance (ANOVAs) between the AI inferences and the occupations coded as female-dominant, male-dominant, or gender-balanced based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data (2023). Inaccuracies such as AI omissions of the Low category for Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability—and bias such as replication of gender stereotypes about women’s personality traits—lead us to advocate for providing AI literacy training in career counselling to educate students about problems with using AI chatbots to provide personality profiles of occupations during career exploration.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Jeanine Williamson, Steven D. Milewski (Author)
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