Workers can pause their all-seeing eye when they need to “check on something personal.” Meta is making some minor concessions in its wildly dystopian plan to track employees’ mouse clicks and keystrokes in the name of AI training. The company has reportedly made some changes to the controversial project known internally as the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), according to a report published in The information.
Meta now plans to allow employees to “pause” tracking for up to 30 minutes if they need to “check on something personal,” the company told workers in a memo. A subset of employees will also be able to request to opt out of the program entirely, although this will be limited to remote workers with bandwidth issues, people who deal with “sensitive” material, and those who often work in spaces where they cannot easily keep their laptops connected to a power source.
In other words, it appears that the vast majority of Meta employees will still have to allow their (nearly) every move to be tracked and recorded in the name of improving Meta’s AI models. However, the company said it improved the software’s battery usage to address complaints from some employees. Reuters reports. The company has faced employee protests over MCI, which was announced last month just before the company laid off 8,000 workers and redistributed thousands more to AI-focused roles.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently defended the program to employees, telling them that “watching really smart people do things” is the best way for AI models to improve quickly. “The average intelligence of the people who work at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people you can assign to tasks,” he said in leaked audio during a company-wide meeting last month.
“None of the data is used to, like, look at what people are doing, or to monitor or track performance, or anything like that. It’s just that we’re using that to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model, so that it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks. I think that’s going to be a really big benefit if we can do that.” He also added that if it works, “we’ll probably do more of that stuff.” in the future.
