Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their
46 points by latein 2 hours ago | 33 comments

codeulike 28 minutes ago
Is this like a game where we choose the next word?

Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their _______

Pets?

Hairstyles?

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nnx 9 minutes ago
Coincidentally this is how pretraining works :)
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dist-epoch 2 minutes ago
TikTok videos
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super256 21 minutes ago
80 characters limit in the title.
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ceejayoz 8 minutes ago
Yeah, but usually folks tweak to paraphrase, instead of lopping off.

I'd have gone with "Meta employees up in arms over mandatory program to train AI on their keystrokes".

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TacticalCoder 11 minutes ago
I thought it was "arms"? Although I take it that then the sentence should have ended with "theirs" and not "their"?
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raxxorraxor 2 hours ago
If you work for meta you shouldn't have a problem with invading the privacy of others.

Of course this is not ok, but you should really quit your job if you have ethical or moral problems with that.

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newshackr 24 minutes ago
There isn't exactly a surplus of jobs today. While some may have this option, many do not.
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spacechild1 17 minutes ago
At this point, Meta's opinion on privacy has been widely known for decades. Working for Meta is a personal choice. There is no excuse.
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physhster 13 minutes ago
^ this! Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, people who decide to work there make the statement that they are ok with it. Same with Palantir, X, Grok, Tesla etc
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none2585 11 minutes ago
Eh - if you have Meta on your resume it's not that tough out there right now.
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yubblegum 26 minutes ago
Oddly enough was watching Colossus: The Forbin Project. One of those mid 70s scifi flicks. At some point, their AI demanded that its creator be under 24/7 audio-visiual surveillance (including bathroom time, yes).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

p.s. was just reading the wiki plot summary and lol'ing at this bit: "Colossus has the responsible programmers summarily executed outside their workplace, left laying 24 hours, and cremated. Colossus also names their replacements. " -- karma is a bitch, indeed.

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notabotiswear 38 minutes ago
>"This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?"

Karma’s a b*tch, innit?

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thedevilslawyer 31 minutes ago
A better reply would have been:

> "This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?"

>> Opt-out is as simple as sending in your resignation to your manager.

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dist-epoch 24 seconds ago
I can't hear you over the sound of the millions I'm making at Meta.
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pluc 12 minutes ago
So they do treat their employees like their users
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spacechild1 16 minutes ago
Nice. Let them taste some of their own medicine.
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LightBug1 3 minutes ago
The most exquisite form of karma.
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throw0101a 9 minutes ago
Now over ten years old (2015-10-16):

> 'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

* https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/654934442549620736

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keybored 2 hours ago
I don’t care about Schadenfreude. It’s good that they are making a stink.

I would bang my head against the wall if they either didn’t make a stink or publicly said that, of course the Company is going to monitor me, it’s their hardware[1] and who am I to be anything but a vessel for my employer on Company time etc.

[1] As seen in the comments on the large thread about this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851948

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thedevilslawyer 29 minutes ago
Schadenfreude is exactly what's needed here. The rallying words can be for another set of people/org.
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zelphirkalt 31 minutes ago
You are (hopefully) a human being firstly, and only in some later capacity "a vessel for my employer on Company time". It would do the world some good, if more people remembered, that they are working with people and their decisions affect people.
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keybored 8 minutes ago
Speaking about Meta employees. There was this anecdote from a month ago:

> very few facebook employees use their products outside of testing, which is a big contributor to that fear - they just can't believe that there are billions of people who would continue to use apps to post what they had for lunch!

> And as a result of that lack of faith, most of them believe that Meta is a bubble and can burst at any point. Consequently, everyone works for the next performance review cycle, and most are just in rush to capture as much money as they could before that bubble bursts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409649

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shevy-java 2 hours ago
It is in a way some kind of modern day slavery. Of course they can always decide to quit, but what if the next company uses the same sniffing strategy? On youtube you can see video clips of indians wearing various glasses to monitor their own manual work procedures. AI has truly become our new overlord, controlled by a few huge companies.
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nicman23 35 minutes ago
lol what. you are getting paying it is not slavery
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zelphirkalt 27 minutes ago
Some people are forced to work in places, which are dehumanizing through work conditions, whether you get paid for it or not doesn't necessarily tell you much. Of course this is not the case for Mete employees, who should have an easy time finding other employment. But these trends are not limited to Meta. They might find application in some shithole of a badly paid job somewhere, where people have only the choice between living poorly in some slums, or serving their local tech overlord.
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vortegne 51 minutes ago
Small-scale imperial boomerang. You thought that you're building a privacy-destroying machine and this machine will never destroy _your_ privacy?

At some point in the future, a lot of the SV techbros will be hopefully viewed as ghouls with no morals or ethics. This is not a subsection of humanity that should be dictating anything and yet they always do. If you complain about this and don't quit your job at Meta, you're failing an extremely basic check.

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zelphirkalt 22 minutes ago
> At some point in the future, a lot of the SV techbros will be hopefully viewed as ghouls with no morals or ethics. This is not a subsection of humanity that should be dictating anything and yet they always do. If you complain about this and don't quit your job at Meta, you're failing an extremely basic check.

I hope you are right, though it will still take a long time, if it ever happens. The base premises of most people is still something along the lines of: Has money -> must be successful -> is smarter than most -> is right and cannot be wrong.

This kind of shortcircuited thinking is superbly annoying and harms us and the planet and every living being on it. I still remember clearly, when I explained to a Facebook fanperson, that FB is a criminal organization, just after they had to pay the highest fines ever for violating people's privacy. Despite the plain facts in front of them they chose not to believe me, because who am I, right? Just an IT person, who cannot possibly know shit, since I am not as rich and famous as Zucky the android.

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gamerslexus 39 minutes ago
> This is not a subsection of humanity that should be dictating anything and yet they always do.

Interesting phrasing. So which subsection of humanity you think should be dictating something?

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rootlocus 12 minutes ago
With all due respect to the guidelines that requires assuming good faith, this sounds like the beginning of a nirvana fallacy.

You don't have to provide a perfect solution to point out something is wrong. People who don't care about the people they lead don't make good leaders. I'd rather have leaders who hurt others by accident than on purpose.

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compass_copium 6 minutes ago
The proletariat, of course.
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ceejayoz 9 minutes ago
> So which subsection of humanity you think should be dictating something?

"Here's your shit sandwich."

"I don't want a shit sandwich!"

I don't have to know what I do want to eat to decline the shit sandwich.

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andrewstuart 2 hours ago
The company is run by lizards in hoodies.
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