The message is intended to garner support for a petition circulating inside the company since last Thursday that demands an end to what Meta calls the Model Capability Initiative. It’s a piece of mandatory software that Meta began installing on the laptops of US employees last month. According to Reuters, the tool records employees’ screens while using certain apps with the goal of collecting “real examples of how people actually use computers,” including “mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus.” Meta has not yet said whether the preliminary data is profitable or not.
“I’m skeptical about AL. On the one hand, I really enjoy using it to write software. On the other hand, I’m really nervous about its impact on the world,” the engineer wrote in an internal forum for coders. “And what kind of norms are we setting about how technology will be used and how people will be treated?”
The petition, also seen by WIRED, states that “It should not be the norm to allow companies of any size to exploit their employees by extracting their data non-consensually for the purposes of al training.”
In the US, employers generally have broad opportunities to monitor workers’ devices for safety, training, evaluation, and security purposes. But using these tools to create datasets that instruct AI systems on how to navigate a computer without human supervision appears to be a new strategy – and one that doesn’t sit right with many meta workers. Over the past few years, many companies have jumped into the race to develop agentic AI models. But when collecting data, they typically recruit volunteers, sometimes paid, who are willing to record their computer activity.
Meta’s decision to move forward with its tracking tool despite weeks of employee protest has become one of the major causes of what 16 current and former employees recently described to WIRED as record-low morale. It is also a leading driver of the employee unionization effort in Meta’s UK offices.
“Workplace monitoring and training of AI models is the number one thing,” says Eleanor Payne, a representative of United Tech and Allied Workers, which helps organize Meta workers. He declined to reveal the number of employees willing to form a labor union, but described it as “significant” and unprecedented.
While only US employees are currently subject to tracking, UK employees are concerned about their colleagues and the possibility of the program expanding. “I think of it as very much a breakdown of trust,” Payne says. She says new laws making it easier to form unions in Britain have encouraged workers about their chances of success.
At Meta offices in California and New York, employees are posting flyers in cafeterias and other communal areas pointing colleagues to the petition. Two employees, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, say that while the company has removed some posters, the ones on bathroom walls will remain in place for a long time.
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