A hot potato: Working for a large tech company isn't the job utopia it once was. In addition to worrying about layoffs and the constant threat of AI, Meta workers will soon have all their mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes logged by the company. What's likely to further annoy workers is the purpose for these keyloggers: to train Meta's AI agents so they can perform work tasks.
A new tool called Model Capability Initiative (MCI) will run on work-related apps and also take occasional snapshots of workers' screens, according to internal memos seen by Reuters.
The memos add that MCI will improve Meta's AI models in areas where they struggle to replicate ways that humans interact with computers, such as choosing dropdown-menu options and using keyboard shortcuts.
A Meta spokesman told the BBC: "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them."
The spokesman added that the data is not used for any other purposes, that the tool has safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and that the information gathered won't be used for evaluation purposes.
Now that Mark Zuckerberg's obsession with the metaverse that led to him changing Facebook's corporate name to Meta is over, the social media giant is going all-in on AI. Like other big tech companies, the embrace of automation has led to thousands of job losses recently.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees that the increase in internal data collection was part of Meta's "AI for Work" efforts, which have now been rebranded as Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA).
Bosworth added that Meta's ultimate vision was for its agents to primarily do the work while humans direct, review, and help improve them. The executive never mentioned how this might affect the number of workers Meta requires, but it certainly sounds like a way of reducing its headcount.
Meta is planning to lay off a massive 10% of its workforce starting on May 20, meaning around 8,000 people will be losing their jobs – the company has already laid off around 2,000 people this year. It's also considering making large additional cuts later this year.
Illustrating the AI problem is a website listing all of Meta's current openings: there were 800 job listings in March. Today, there are seven.
Employee responses to news that everything they do will be recorded to train an AI that could replace them have been pretty much what you'd expect. One worker who asked not to be named called it "very dystopian."
"This company has become obsessed with AI," they told the BBC.
Another person who recently left Meta said the tool is just the latest way that it's "shoving AI down everyone's throat," which could describe the industry as a whole right now.
Not every company is following Meta and shoehorning AI into every aspect of its workflow. Duolingo recently stopped evaluating workers based on how much they use the technology. It's a metric that many others, including Meta, have introduced.