Shockingly, the Meta staff are not very keen on training their robots. Reuters reports that employees have begun distributing leaflets in several US offices protesting the company’s installation of tracking software on their work computers.
“You don’t want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?” asked the flyers. They have reportedly been found in meeting rooms, vending machines, and even the most sacred of places: atop toilet paper dispensers. Leaflets encourage workers to sign an online petition against Meta’s labor surveillance system.
The pamphlets and petitions cite the US National Labor Law. “Employees are legally protected if they choose to organize to improve working conditions,” the petition continued. A similar movement is underway in the UK, where workers are beginning to organize a unionization campaign with the United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW).
All of this follows last month’s announcement that Meta will install software on employees’ computers to track mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes. The program, called the Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA), is designed to train AI agents to perform complex computing tasks. “This is where all Meta employees can help make our models better by doing their daily work,” read a company memo announcing the program.
“When we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real-world examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, keystrokes, and navigating drop-down menus,” said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone. Reuters. The company has tried to reassure its employees that sensitive information will be protected, saying their information will be “strictly controlled.”
The reaction of the staff was not so positive. “This makes me uncomfortable,” wrote an engineering manager on an internal message board, The New York Times reported a few weeks after the schedule was announced. Others expressed concern that they were helping to train their successors. “How do we get out?”, asked another employee. (CTO Andrew Bosworth has confirmed that they won’t be able to get out.)
It is difficult to imagine that employees are warm regardless of the context. But the fact that the ATA is accompanied by a 10 percent reduction in the company’s workforce makes the backlash even worse. One employee reportedly remarked that the program was “incredibly condescending.” One told Bosworth, “Your insensitivity to the plight of your employees is concerning.” Employees have created websites that count until May 20 for layoffs. (One describes the event as “The Big Good Demolition.”)
As for how many workers will lose their jobs, Meta is still working on that. “We don’t really know how big the company will be in the future,” CFO Susan Li told investors in April. “I think there’s a lot of change right now, AI capabilities are advancing rapidly.”
