No, it isn't remotely unreasonable. It is completely disrespectful of a candidate to make them "interview" with a bot. I'm not going to work for a company which disrespects me in that way right up front.

"disrespect" is doing quite a heavy lifting here. if the company is honest and upfront about it, why do you consider it any different from automated coding test or the implicit Resume scanner?

Ultimately, a company has to filter job applications and find the right fit. and I consider a number of things companies actually do to be very disrespectful and demeaning. for eg: getting interviewed by clueless HR who have zero techinical expertise, not sharing salary range in advance, asking leetcode hard questions, forcing AI bullshit etc

With that framing, i consider AI interview to be less disrespectful and something i am ok with.

Interview is a two-way communication. Just as companies evaluating the candidates, the candidates are also evaluating the company.

How would the company feels if the people applying uses AI avatar to answer the interview questions too?

I am assuming that all interviews are not AI, and it is only initial filter. if not, then i will filter the company out!!

Would you be okay with applicants using AI for these interviews? If I have thousands of applications out and I can use AI to better filter the companies I want to work for then it's an improvement.

You're completely wrong.

"better" is an objective evaluation that you can do in a test, not in an interview with an AI.

And AIs always have human bias encoded, because it's trained on human data. That's a well known problem with no absolute solution.