Meta’s Embrace of A.I. Is Making Its Employees Miserable
As it adapts to the artificial intelligence era, the company is pushing many of its 78,000 workers to use the technology, and preparing to lay some of them off.
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.
“This makes me super uncomfortable,” an engineering manager wrote in a comment in response to the announcement, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “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 emojis, according to the messages.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has staked the future of his company on A.I. by weaving the powerful technology into apps like Facebook and Instagram and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on developing A.I. models and data centers. But as the Silicon Valley company tries to transition from an internet firm to an A.I. organization, its embrace of the technology has been awkward and, at times, downright ugly.
