When employees need to “check on something personal,” they can block out all-seeing eyes.
Meta AI is making some small concessions in its extremely dystopian plan to track employees’ mouse clicks and keystrokes in the name of training. According to a report, the company has reportedly made some changes to the controversial project known as Model Capability Initiative (MCI). Information.
Meta now plans to allow employees to “pause” tracking for up to 30 minutes when they need to do “some personal checks,” the company told workers in a memo. A subset of employees will also be able to request to opt out of the program entirely, though this will be limited to remote workers with bandwidth concerns, people who deal with “sensitive” material and those who often work in locations where they can’t easily keep a laptop connected to a power source.
In other words, it seems that most of Meta’s employees will still be required to allow their (almost) every move to be tracked and recorded in the name of improving Meta’s AI models. However, the company said it had improved the software’s battery usage to address some employee complaints, reuters Report. The company has faced employee opposition over MCI, which was announced last month just before the company laid off 8,000 employees and shuffled thousands more into AI-focused roles.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently defended the program in front of employees, telling them that “seeing really smart people working” is the best way to rapidly improve AI models. “The average IQ of the people who work at this company is significantly higher than the average group of people you could work with,” he said in leaked audio from a company-wide meeting last month.
“No data is being used to watch what people are doing, or monitor, or track performance.[ing]Or anything like that. It’s totally like, we’re using it to feed huge amounts of content into an AI model to kind of learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks. I think it would be a huge benefit if we could do that.” He also said that if it worked, “we’d probably do more things like this in the future”.
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