Meta used AI to target workers with medical conditions for layoffs | Hacker News Reader

Meta used AI to target workers with medical conditions for layoffs

reuters.com

33 pointsnlpnerd6 comments

This is an ROI on AI story.

AI enables employers to make cases for "low performance" against those who take medical leave or "excessive" leave.

Once they're identified AI can generate a report they don't send enough email, talk enough at meetings, type enough keystrokes etc. to give metrics to a preordained conclusion.

Look long and hard enough and everyone will far short of cherry picked metrics in some way.

Also a story about rediscovering issues faced by unions. Sometimes seemingly-arbitrary and bureaucratic rules exist because they are old countermeasures developed for sneaky stuff like this. ("Chesterton's Fence" situations.)

It's much easier to say "contract says X" than to get into a difficult game of proving that employers had a nefarious ulterior motive.

Meta and the type of people who work at Meta deserve each other.

Can confirm. The average tech people I worked with there skewed towards not exactly cool, well-rounded, solidarity-aware, socially-responsible (except performatively) individuals. Didn't meet anyone technical there I'd ever want to hang out with, but I must've arrived 10 years too late.

Honestly, the article title is a bit of clickbait. The main complaint is about people on medical leave being disadvantaged by the token usage as performance metric that was introduced.

That doesn't sound like it? From the article:

>> According to the complaint, Meta used a number of internal AI-assisted systems to score and rank employees on a termination list. Those included "Metamate," a large language model assistant; an employee-trained "second brain" that tracked workers' communications and documents; and a productivity score drawn from scanning keystrokes, screen content, emails and browser history, according to the lawsuit.

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