An internal Meta post announcing a tracking system used to improve AI assistants received hundreds of angry comments and emojis from employees who feared they were being replaced. The company launched the software last month, which allowed AI to follow each employee's clicks and keystrokes as they go about their workday.
'For agents to understand how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers, we need to train our models on real examples,' the announcement read, per Business Insider. More than 100 angry and surprised emojis riddled the comment section as employees voiced their concerns, Reuters reported.
Multiple employees reported fears that they were unknowingly training their inevitable AI replacement. 'This makes me super uncomfortable,' an engineering manager wrote in a comment reviewed by the New York Times. 'How do we opt out?'
However, Meta's Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, responded that employees would not be able to opt out of the program on their company laptops. 'Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning,' an anonymous employee fired back at Bosworth, according to the Times.
Others worried that the constant collection of employee data and habits would become a security risk. 'This data is very tightly controlled,' Bosworth said. 'This will not be a leak risk.' Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told the Times that the new employee tracking program was only meant to improve AI products. 'There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose,' he said.
Mark Zuckerberg has pushed AI usage across Meta's social platforms in recent years, investing billions into the evolving AI market. 'I think we know that AI is one of the most competitive fields, probably in history,' he has said. Meta has already implemented AI deeply into its services, including on Facebook and Instagram. The company's 78,000 employees have been encouraged to adopt constantly evolving AI policies.
Although Zuckerberg claimed that the software was not being used for 'surveillance or performance tracking or anything like that,' to offset AI spending, the company has allegedly already planned to slash its workforce by ten percent, according to an April 17 announcement. Meta's Head of Human Resources, Janelle Gale, said the workforce changes were meant to 'offset the other investments we're making.'
'I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity, which is incredibly unsettling,' she said. The layoffs were allegedly set to be carried out on May 20, Meta employees told the Times. As thousands of employees brace for the layoffs, none of them knows whether their employment is about to come to an abrupt end, or if they will be replaced by the very software that tracked them. 'It's incredibly demoralizing,' an employee commented.
