Meta’s embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

Layoffs, tracking of workers and push to adopt AI tools have led to anger and anxiety

- Kalley Huang, Eli Tan and Kate Conger

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has staked the future of the company on AI by weaving it into apps like Facebook and Instagram and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on developing AI models and data centres.

(PHOTO: REUTERS)

In an internal post in April, Meta told its US employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them.

What employees typed on 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 anti-social and callous.

“This makes me super uncomfortable,” an engineering manager wrote in response to the announcement. “How do we opt out?”

“There is no option to opt out on your corporate laptop,” replied Mr Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer. Employees reacted by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emojis, according to the messages.

Mr Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has staked the future of his company on AI by weaving the powerful technology into apps like Facebook and Instagram and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on developing AI models and data centres.

But as the Silicon Valley company tries to transition from an internet company to an AI organisation, its embrace of the technology has been awkward and, at times, downright ugly.