NYT: 'Meta's Embrace of AI Is Making Its Employees Miserable' (indianexpress.com)
- Reference: 0183172250
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/05/10/0545234/nyt-metas-embrace-of-ai-is-making-its-employees-miserable
- Source link: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/metas-embrace-of-ai-is-making-its-employees-miserable-10681907/
And "After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees' computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up." (One employee even told Meta's CTO in an internal post, "Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning."
> In an internal post last month, Meta told its U.S. employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them. What employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screen would be tracked, Meta said. The goal, the company said, was to capture employee data so Meta's artificial intelligence models could learn "how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers." Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, calling it antisocial and callous... [One engineering manager even asked "How do we opt out?"] "There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop," replied Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer. Employees reacted by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emoji, according to the messages....
>
> Meta is pushing its 78,000 employees to adopt AI tools and factoring their use of the technology in performance reviews. The company is also tracking employees' computer work to feed and train its AI models. And it is cutting jobs to offset its AI spending, saying last month that it would slash 10% of its workforce. That has led to anger and anxiety as employees await news of whether they are affected by the layoffs, which are slated to be carried out May 20, according to 11 current and former Meta employees. Some said they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal that they wanted to be laid off so they could receive severance pay, the current and former employees said. "It's incredibly demoralizing," an employee who does user research wrote in an internal post, which was reviewed by the Times...
>
> Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees' consumption of "tokens," a unit of AI use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many AI agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.
[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/metas-embrace-of-ai-is-making-its-employees-miserable-10681907/
META is doing this to make them quit (Score:1)
It's part of the layoff handbook. It's far less expensive to reduce your workforce if you upset your employees, make them miserable and they quit. You save severance, and numerous of "benefit" overheads. So they are making them miserable to be able to push them out. I'd guess the true target for META reduction is close to 40% of employees released in this wave. Majority replaced by AI, or pretty robots to replace the "pretty" faces. Then after the 40% they'll go for another 40%, with AI outpacing employees
Re: (Score:3)
That's actually a smart strategy.
But I wonder how many employees will quit in today's job market.
Re: META is doing this to make them quit (Score:1)
ðY it was probably their AI optimization algorithm that advise them to do this
Re: (Score:2)
According to TFS, the layoffs are due on 20th May. No one is going to voluntarily quit if they can just phone it in for another 8 working days and get at least some additional severence pay to tide them over while they look for a new job. If they don't get cut and are still hacked off enough on the 21st, that's probably when people are going to start to quit.
Of course, one thing Meta is very good at is profiling people. And another, as TFS points out, is being callous sociopaths. Chances are they've f
Re:META is doing this to make them quit (Score:5, Interesting)
European employees can complain about violation of their privacy from this tracking. I expect lawyers could also make a strong case that training an AI amounts to constructive dismissal and take Facebook to their country's labour relations tribunals over it.
Re: (Score:2)
Fecebook has lasted a long time considering the dodgy privacy and advertising deals. To be honest, they're on borrowed time so reducing the headcount constructively now achieves maximum shareholder value.
However, if they wanted to be a longer-term platform they should have looked at ways to focus on moderation, both human and AI scoring, rather than label themselves a platform and not moderate. That would encourage people to use their "platform" for communication.
It's 2026 - some years ago I thought that th
What did they expect? (Score:2)
Theyre working for a company founded by a thieving sociopath that treats its users as monetisable assets. Why did they think theyd get special treatment when push came to shove?
making its employees miserable (Score:1)
Since when did employees matter?
Re: (Score:2)
When you cared about product longevity else you spend more time schooling employees than them working, company B down the road that focus on longevity will have a better product, or more products as their time is used more wisely.
Thanks that I live in Europe (Score:3, Insightful)
Next time somebody criticize Europe for "too much regulation", remind them of the consequences of not having regulation, as in this case. This is cyberpunk-level dystopia become true. And nobody, as expected, is revolting against it.
Re: Thanks that I live in Europe (Score:2)
Revolutions require a substantial proportion of a group/population to act together at the same time as one. A few people here or there trying it just get bulldozed.
AI Will Make You All Non-Billionares Miserable (Score:3)
It's a thing to make rich people richer, so keep tickling the dragon's tail with your infatuation.
Re: (Score:2)
I think there's something more sinister. They know their bubble has burst, so want fewer people to deal with when the bottom line doesn't look so great.
So they are just getting what they gave? (Score:2)
Considering the company that they work for, this is merely karma.
Tokens are the new lines of code (Score:2)
Seems like maybe not the best metrics.
Re: (Score:2)
LOC was a good metric then?
Unionize (Score:2)
This is a clear cut situation where workers should unionize to push back on this bullshit.
Do you care about zuckerberg and the shareholders? (Score:1)
Dear Meta employees,
When will you understand that you basically work to create software that will fire you later?
And, please, do you care about zuckerberg who needs to eat every day?
And do not forget the poor shareholders supporting Meta who need also to get their food.
So, please, behave like expected slaves and do not complain.
Fecebook (Score:2)
Fecebook enshitified their site and became hostile to their users, but doing so to their employees will have similar predictable results to every future product.