@gerrymcgovern I know that automated underwriting from mortgages had been out for a while, but it was about 20 years ago this year that the student loan lender I used to work for decided to use desktop underwriting for private school loans. We did federal student loans but they had a private school loan that you had to qualify for with a credit score of at least 620, the higher your score of the lower the margin.
Anyway, nobody realized it was a problem for about a year. They weren’t even having human beings look at the credit report as long as the computer approved the private loan you would get the private loan. Great, except some of these 18 year-old kids had their dad‘s mortgage on their credit report because they were a junior.
Then in their sophomore year when they would apply for these private loans so they could continue going to school they would get denied because their dad would have fixed his credit report in the meantime realizing his mortgage wasn’t even on it, so it would come off junior’s report.
And this is life ruining, especially if a kid got into his third year before he started getting denied.
Imagine giving someone a whole bunch of debt and then shutting them off before they can even get their degree, but making their payments due six months after you deny them the ability to continue going to school?
Yeah that wasn’t even AI, that was just lazy CEOs thinking that humans wouldn’t have to ever check the computer’s work. And when I brought it to their attention my supervisor just shrugged and said “well they got approved” I started yelling about how it should be criminal to approve them with false information, if they tried it it would be fraud. WTF