Is artificial intelligence taking over jobs? That is a fear that continues to circulate and cause concern for workers everywhere. AI can also be very useful, though. It has helped in medicine, mechanics, and just about anything one can think of. But it’s important to remember that the machine is only as good as its programmer and all of them have been trained, at least in some part, by humans. There’s room for improvement, of course, and to that end, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg has come up with a plan – using AI to track employees’ work movements. Is this a cause for concern? Is Zuckerburg stomping all over privacy rights? Are workers essentially training their replacements? Depends on who you talk to.
The AI World
Competition in the field of artificial intelligence is intense. Everyone, from pretty much every governmental and business sector is trying to one-up the competition, which means companies have to be very innovative and proactive to succeed. AI can do a lot of things, but there are a lot it still cannot do, which is why there are so many trainings and upgrades to systems. In January, OpenAI was reportedly asking third-party contractors to upload samples of their real work products from past jobs which included spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. The contractors were instructed to scrub any confidential material before they submitted the works.
Meta, in fierce competition with OpenAI and Google, is taking that a step further. A new tool, the Model Capability Initiative, will not just focus on past, completed jobs. Instead, it will work in real-time with employees, capturing every keystroke and mouse movement as well as taking occasional snapshots of whatever happens to be on the worker’s screens at the time.
When reached for comment by TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson provided the following statement: “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus. To help, we’re launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models. There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose.”
Meta Hurdles
The kicker here is that employees do not have the option to opt out of the intrusion. Before now, logging and screenshotting technology was usually only used by companies and managers to discover worker misconduct – think playing solitaire or scrolling through social media sites instead of working. Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Yale University, told Reuters that this move to “log employees’ keystrokes takes the data-gathering goals a step further, subjecting white-collar employees to a degree of real-time surveillance previously experienced only by delivery drivers and gig workers.”
In the US, there isn’t a federal law forbidding this type of worker surveillance – but the same is not true in other countries. In Europe, for example, the law would likely prohibit such monitoring, and in Italy, electric monitoring to track employee productivity is explicitly prohibited, Reuters explained.
Another hurdle for Meta to overcome is the fear and insecurity this new AI tool will create among its workers. Are they just training artificial intelligence to take over their jobs? While some might argue that this is paranoia talking, Fortune had this to say: “The broader goal seems to be to build AI agents capable of performing white-collar tasks on their own, the exact software Meta is racing to ship out amid competition from OpenAI and Anthropic.” Since the tool will be following along workers’ movements, learning what they do in certain programs, it doesn’t seem like a non-concern.
Even as Meta is implementing this new AI tool, it is planning on laying off 10% of its workforce globally starting May 20 and may be adding additional cuts later this year. Meta is not the only AI-heavy company looking to downsize their human workers. Amazon.com laid off 30,000 corporate employees in just the past few months. Block.XYZ, a finance company, got rid of nearly half of its staff in February.
As companies race to build smarter systems and stay ahead of the competition, the line between innovation and intrusion is starting to blur. AI may be a powerful tool, but it still relies on human input. When workers are asked to give up privacy and potentially help train systems that could replace them, it raises serious questions about fairness and control. Progress may be inevitable, but how it’s handled matters.
