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Departing Meta staffer posts biting anti-AI video internally amid mass layoffs
(www.motherjones.com)
Man that's an awful video, but I do agree with it.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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This is a company of really smart people who work really hard—coders, engineers, designers—people whose creativity and intellect is a part of their job.
Smart enough to see their work is causing massive harm on a global scale? I know we all need jobs because capitalism commodifies life, but we CAN choose where we work.
Edit to add: if these very smart people were able to land jobs at Meta, they're likely very employable elsewhere and the CHOSEto work for Meta.
I feel like we've been seeing AI coding doing a shit job at big corporations, i.e. Microsoft. My expectation is that the harder Meta leans into AI, the worse their products will get, and they'll start begging their employees to come back--and I hope they get the finger in response.
It's a Golden Age for corporate execs right now - no matter how they fuck up everybody will blame it on AI.
and reassigned another 7,000 to train AI models.
They didn't fire those who train the AI. They fired those who don't.
I work for a tech company that has an AI product (that i use and find valuable), and the execs are talking about investing more in their employees, not less. You'll never guess which. Not all AI companies are trying to automate the whole company. If you have these personnel assets, throwing that away is short sighted. You should be able to run circles around people downsizing if you just empower your employees to use AI when it actually does make sense.
Im convinced AI is like the dot com bubble, not all offerings are worth what we are being told, but for some things its the only way that makes sense anymore. By 2030, this will settle into a new normal where these laid off employees will find work in related areas that weren't possible before, and the companies that overvalued AI will take a hit.
Edit: if you downvote can you say why? Im no AI stan, I think its being mishandled all over, but I do see a few valid use cases. Id like to know if im missing something, or if people are just sick of hearing people talk about AI.
I think you're getting downvotes because you don't quite see how the increased productivity is the mirror image of layoffs. AI doesn't have to replace people to decimate a lot of people's lives. All it has to do is make some people more productive. Firms will layoff the remainder over the headcount needed to deliver with AI. That's the promise AI companies are selling and the layoffs are already happening in junior roles that. There's absolutely no guarantee that new demand for more software product would appear in the economy which would create jobs for those people. You think there would be but that's a bet and plenty such bets have ended up with permanently deskilled and downwardly mobile parts of the population in the past.
So how does this differ from any innovation? This viewpoint feels "anti-innovation" not "anti-AI". Computers put a lot of people out of jobs, but we don't wish they would go away.
My take: I don't hate AI, I hate the AI industry.
I've worked with classic AI for a very, very long time, I was even writing sentence parsers back in the 90s. AI overall is fascinating and can do wonderful things in science, medical, and other fields, especially ML-based tools. A good example would be MRI scanning, or tools I've worked on that scan for inappropriate medication use to save lives.
Some job loss with each phase of innovation is expected, but it's this blown up "AI can do everything" without errors BS destroying way too many jobs than makes sense that kills the industry for me.
The difference between this and computers or any innovation and what its prior is the pace of change which determines the social cost. Few would object to innovation if the innovation replaced them as they retired from the workforce instead of forcing them to bear the social cost mid-life. A family, a community, a region that goes through serious deskilling event is't a happy place. All sorts of real measurements of misery and illness go up. So this process isn't popular and frankly it shouldn't be acceptable. The situation we find ourselves in North America, prior to the AI shift, is to a large extent the result of a string of such events. A situation where nearly half the population wants to see the other punished. AI is promising to do a massive shift and quicker than many previous events, including at the uppet end of the payscale.
So yeah, it's not the technology, the innivation. It's how our capitalist systen rolls it out. At what social cost, borne by whom, and whom reaping the upside. AI promises a fast, painful change at a time when everyone is already struggling, without welfare to soften the blow, while concetrating the benefits in fewer hands. Benefits that also translate to power, economic and political. So people rightfully reject this proposition. The tech is getting tarred with it.
This is what annoys me about “fuck AI” being the new trendy/cool thing. The issue is not AI itself, and if done right, can be a huge benefit to humanity as a whole. The issue is all the greed of the rich capitalists in control of it. And, also, when it’s needlessly shoved down our throats when it truly has no benefit, or in fact only drawbacks.
The system we have pretty much guarantees it won't be done right and you know it. I can safely assume that. Then I don't have to be too bothered by the distinction. If there's two options in theory but only one in practice, then why bother uhm-akshually it myself? No point - "fuck AI" is good enough. Don't mean I won't (have to) use it and navigate the landscape. I just bought a couple of R9700s for local inference for family and friends, to fuck AI.
AI can bring enormous societal benefit in non-capitalist systems. The AI we have today. That won't be us though. We're in for pain.
I agree that we’re in for pain, given that capitalism runs the show, but there is a world where AI takes mostly all of the jobs, where we use renewable energy, and capitalism crumbles by necessity. If everything is automated, and electricity becomes essentially free, then all necessities become essentially free. Of course, it is much more likely that the oligarchy prevents that from happening and we have no jobs and we have to pay for everything that costs them nothing.
I guess what I want to say is that the technology shouldn’t be villainized; the villains should be villainized. The solution isn’t to get rid of AI, it’s to get rid of the ultra-wealthy and work towards a society not run by late stage capitalism.
Agreed, but...
AI is promising to do a massive shift and quicker than many previous events, including at the uppet end of the payscale.
This bothers me, because this has the connotation of "this time it's important because it impacts me".
Automations against low level jobs were just as quick, they just may not have impacted the people you knew.
Why should "this bothers me" matter? It's a fucking logical argument. You either understand it or you don't. Your fucking FEELINGS have nothing to do with anything.
Doesn't have to bother you. People experience material changes first and foremost, which means they have to be affected by them. We're in this context, have much more information about the pace and impact since it's hapoening to us as we speak, in a high information environment where we hear our bosses talk in no uncertain terms about it. I don't know if its effect would be worse than deindustrialization. I don't personally put the previous events as less important, but I won't blame impacted people who do.
AI could make sense one day if it comes with UBI to compensate its social impact and if it optimizes enough processes to compensate for its ecological footprint. We are far* from this and there's nowhere enough political pressure to make it happen.
You're assuming AI will successfully replace enough jobs to have a social impact. You're buying into the hype. I can't think of a single job it can replace.
It’s devaluating human worth in the workplace. Solid paying jobs will go away. You will still work, you just won’t live as comfortably.
You will still work, you just won’t live as comfortably.
if you find a new job
I can't think of a single job it can replace.
Me either and I don't think it ever will reach that. We're already seeing diminishing returns.
The thing is it doesn't need to replace a full job. If it improves productivity by 10% then that's the number that will either lose their job or just not get hired in the first place.
I'm sure these are very worrying times for folks in college, especially computer science and the arts.
UBI seems like the only long term solution to me.
It already has a social impact on the people's whose intellectual property was pirated, the employees traumatized by nsfw filtering tasks and the reduction of white collar junior recruitment (probably non junior too?). I know some people think it's just a bubble, companies are waiting to see what happens and the job market will recover. I am doubtful of it.
My tech company is pushing us to use it so they provide the top tools. From what I have observed, I have little doubt it will replace a lot of the designing, engineering, coding and communication time. Yes, you will still need some knowledgeable person to guide and review, but less than before. Similarly to how you need less people to build a car today than you did in the 50', and even less for an electric car, because so much more is automated.
So far automation and the internet did create more better paid jobs than it destroyed, maybe it will happen with "AI" too, but I am skeptical.
Finally, in my opinion, UBI and work time reduction with equivalent quality of life is a desirable future.
It's going fully replace a LOT of jobs, and as future iterations learn more and more, it will replace even more complex jobs. You are underestimating the Ferengi's compulsion for more wealth. They will let quality slip significantly, if it means higher profits.
In a few years, they be gaslighting us that double digit unemployment is perfectly normal in a healthy, high-tech society.
My insurance provider has already replaced all of its customer service staff with AI. As I found out when I tried to ask them a question the other day. I'm changing insurance companies.
If you're talking about the automated phone thing, they've been trying to do that since the 90s. In the past the secret "get me a human" trick was to keep mashing zero till you got a human. Today, you can just keep saying "human" or "I need to speak to a human".
They will automate everything possible. It's like ignoring they keep trying because they haven't completely succeeded yet....
When does it “actually make … sense”?
I can only say I find it useful for coding, and its way faster to ask it questions instead of searching documentation. It can read the code base, and explain it to me instead of me trying to understand the cryptic 2 and 3 letter variable names the last a hole used, in their 57 state state machine, all states just numbered, no names (why a state machine in python? Some people...) Then when I want to change something in the code that is substantial, I can ask it to write a draft that I then refine, saving keystrokes on boiler plate. It can suggest data structures and algorithms I've not yet used or heard of, and then I can learn about them, making me smarter as well.
I did this all on my own before with a lot of grep and find commands, reading python/perl/c++/tcl/git/cvs documentation. Then tracking down someone to explain the piece Im not understanding. It turns a few weeks worth of hard effort into a relaxed few days of feeling more productive.
Even just linting, I can ask it, why is this function not giving me the expected outcome (in terms that simple), and it finds the 1 off error faster than me, like in 5 sec in 500 lines of code.
Its like having someone with perfect recall that has read all of the code base, and all comp science info on the web, sitting next to me. Its not a great coder, but I can get the information i need to be the good coder I am faster than google and grep. Not using it now is like insisting that O'Reilly books (which i have read for fun in the past) are better than searching the online docs or google.
AI can‘t read or write. It processes and computes data in entirely different ways than we do: Based on probability. It doesn‘t understand context at all. We‘ll see how well vibe coding holds up in due time when more of our infrastructure is vibe coded and fewer solutions are actually understood.
I wouldn't call what im doing vibe coding, would you?
Ill also say, who cares if it reads or writes? The point is it makes me more effective at my job, the fact it is presented as a conversation as opposed to another format is an implementation detail not a critical feature.
I also find it very useful to bounce ideas, like an interactive rubber duck. Even when it’s wrong it can help me think out loud or elaborate ideas. It’s also very useful to help me set up tests, raise and delete environments, write documentation, etc. all things that I can do on my own, it can help make implementation faster. AI can be useful when you use it like a tool. I know it can and will make mistakes, but like all tools it can help make things faster when used correctly.
i have colleagues for that
In my field its common for my colleagues to not have enough experience outside of their role to provide the feedback im looking for. They help in conversation for sure, but the wide knowledge base that is available through AI is my biggest win.
That and I cant over utilize it (well at least as a rubber duck). I can bug my colleagues too much and get in their way if im too talkative.
I have an actual rubber duck for that. I hate it when my colleagues interrupt me just because they forgot how lambdas work
that also helps. truth be told we're all too busy to do actual rubberducking unless we work on something together so proxies are a good alternative.
The entirety of Lemmy is default 10 downvotes if you suggest AI might have some useful applications.
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Anyone has a link to the original? Couldn't find it with a basic search.
In terms of public posts, there seems to just be Mother Jones' repost of part of the video which is embedded in the article.
I hope the full thing gets out, I'd love to see more of it.
Basic searches haven’t been working well for me either lately. I tried running the query through a basic AI-First Conversational Agentic Experience but it just keeps saying to stay where I am and that the police are on the way? Weird
Thank God there are other search engines.
Bing
It's the end of the fucking world!
It's on Meta's chatboard, not anywhere public. I saw people on Blind discussing it, if you have access there.