• abrake@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    Alright, if you look at this story from a more reputable source (Reuters), it’s quite a bit different. Meta isn’t accused of using AI with people’s medical information to make early diagnoses and lay them off. Instead,

    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.

    The 26 plaintiffs, who ⁠filed the lawsuit anonymously, are accusing Meta of violating federal and state laws that ban discrimination or retaliation against workers who have disabilities, take medical leave or are ​pregnant. They also claim that Meta failed to test its AI systems for ​bias in ⁠violation of recently adopted California and New York City laws.

    So it’s still shitty workplace surveillance and discrimination but not the same kind of surveillance and discrimination alleged in the Twitter posts. Meta is using AI to try to rank workers’ productivity (on a bunch of shitty metrics) in a way that may discriminate against people with disabilities or who take medical leave or who are pregnant.

    • vane@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      What a bullshit arguments.

      Decl. ¶¶ 19; Doe 4 Decl. ¶¶ 11. The monitoring program—announced internally as the “Model Capability Initiative”—thus captured not only employees’ work output but also their protected-leave and medical activity.

      Literally in the court case papers.
      source: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.474171/gov.uscourts.cand.474171.1.0.pdf

      You will now say this is not true ? You’re AI enthusiast, Meta employee or something ?

      • abrake@lemmy.world
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        13 days ago

        I literally said that Meta was firing people for protected leave, disabilities, and medical issues. What I was denying is that they were firing people on the basis of “pre-diagnoses.” All the complaints in the lawsuit are based on diagnoses that employees disclosed to Meta. I think that’s shitty and illegal, but I don’t think there is evidence that Meta is acquiring undisclosed medical information about their employees and using that for layoffs.

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.mlOP
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      13 days ago

      Reuters is not a reputable source. And it’s the same headline

      Meta isn’t accused of using AI with people’s medical information to make early diagnoses and lay them off. Instead,

      Because Meta doesn’t have access to their medical info yet. They would 100% do so if they ever managed to get their hands on this info. Big corporations can’t wait to go full Aktion T4 mode.

      • Physnrd@lemmy.world
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        13 days ago

        I always heard Reuters is very reputable. Can you share some evidence that shows why you think it isn’t?

      • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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        13 days ago

        So did they look at weird boobie pictures to decide to fire female employees or nah?

        • geneva_convenience@lemmy.mlOP
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          13 days ago

          They would if they could. That’s the point.

          They’re already using AI to detect medical conditions to fire people on.

          Capitalism will eventually look at your weird boobie pictures and fire you for them if you Capitalism long enough.

          • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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            13 days ago

            Probably any system that is managed too efficiently starts to suck.

            This is really an interesting example. Not sure if one should blame AI or capitalism for this. Kinda reminds me of Gattaca.

            Theoretically capitalism could do this manually to optimize for profit, but there are limits. You can only hire so many completely psychotic human resources employees until very weird and bad shit starts to happen and your company is sucked straight into a hellmouth. But an AI robot is completely objective, unemotional, unbiased, beautifully soulless and can surely maximize profit endlessly with no pesky human side effects. Obviously it can’t but that is the dream.

            • geneva_convenience@lemmy.mlOP
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              13 days ago

              Capitalism exists to serve, you guessed it, capital.

              This means those who have money will be served and those who don’t have money will not.

              Big banks who have money are getting bailouts and poor people have their social security removed.

              Large companies have their needs fulfilled and those who don’t have money are not.