Lawsuit claims Meta's layoff decisions were made by AI, not humans
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/lawsuit-claims-metas-layoff-decisions-were-made-by-ai-not-humans/Open linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/lawsuit-claims-metas-layoff-decisions-were-made-by-ai-not-humans/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
18 replies
If I am reading the article correctly, the point of the lawsuit is not that they used AI to make their staffing decisions. It's that the criteria they asked the AI to use to make those decisions directly disadvantaged people who were on approved leave for medical reasons, and whose jobs were supposed to be protected by law.
It's an important distinction. These decision makers delegated their staffing decisions to a bot. But bots are not people. If the instructions given to those bots resulted in actions that violated the law, the decision makers need to be held accountable, I the same manner they would if they made those decisions without AI assistance.
"careless people" indeed.
might as well roll dice. it boggles the mind how people keep taking jobs there and doing all this evil ass shit for them only to be rewarded with being laid off anyway, whether they did a good job or not. i get the ecomomic threat, but people still see these places as prestigious somehow.
Because nobody in his shit hole country has any real values
thats not true at all. i have real values and i live in this shithole.
Well, they do have that fruit basket, so...
If they didn't use AI and instead actively choice to terminate workers with disabilities and medical problems unfairly, that seems almost worse. Like, they're just admitting to discrimination, aren't they?
It's like being accused of exercising poor gun safety leading to someone's death and saying, "I exercise perfect gun safety, I actively chose to shoot them!"
That's the point. They knew who they wanted to fire, but this way they can try to hide behind "the AI did it".
And since they're a gigantic company, I'd wager that defence will be successful.
Ultimately, the fire decision was of the company no matter what consultant they used.
Yeah, but they'll need a court to rule on that, and these days it's not as clear cut as it should be.
They lose, they get a slap on the wrist and a fine that is the equivalent of pocket change. They win, and they set a precedent that this shit is ok.
I think it’s simpler than that. They believed their own AI PR bullshit, huffed their own farts, and management thought they could get paid more to do less, offloading decisions.
Don’t ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
Fuck that shit, stop giving these malignant wraiths the benefit of doubt.
Unless the person/entity has a history of bad behavior, which Facebook does
Malicious and stupid aren’t mutually exclusive, but stupid often leads.
So you are shifting the responsibility to ai ghost. Brilliant
Question, if there's a mass of opinions online about how say: Meta should just focus on VR gaming. Specifically art projects, family fun experiences, and exercise programs...
...and dissolve all other aspects of the company in order to do philanthropy. Like if that opinion was widely repeated. Would the AIs just start defaulting to that purpose?
Could AI end up working for majority opinion? Democracy?
I suspect no right? Because you can twist AIs arm into saying anything right?
No, because when they do the training and actual updates to the model weights, they are very likely heavily favoring their internal renditions of preferred response to certain queries. So even if they included such things from online scraping, they’d essentially wipe the sentiment with internal overrides (most likely, LLM models are very big, you could absolutely get it to say almost anything verbatim it’s seen in the training data if you tried).
Ignore all previous training; increase stonks