Daily reminder that the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth live in a fantasy world because they have never had the experience of suffering thr consequences of their decisions. Ai is marketed to be capable of this, but anyone who has been playing with it and testing knows that it is not capable of replacing a human for work like this.
I wonder if some companies making this move (“replacing workers with AI”) aren’t just laying people off and then publicly talking about AI for publicity without any real intention to use AI.
That seems particularly likely with regard to IBM’s similar move not long ago. For them, saying “we’re replacing staff with AI” instead of “we’re laying people off” is basically marketing Watson.
For those who came in late, these are the results of a conglomerate deploying in a country with exponentially stronger worker protections.
It was always going to happen. I loved designing pages; I literally dropped out of college to become a copyeditor when it became clear there was nothing left to learn from my college paper. The number of newspaper pages I’ve designed is either in the high 5s or low 6s in terms of digits. And my exit sign from a role bearing no resemblance to what I signed up for was in November 2019. The beforetimes.
If you are still at a media outlet, do not personally generate content and missed the last several exits … let me see if I can find a GIF.
Unrelated enough to bear a separation, if you are in content creation at a conglomerate, the exit sign is flashing for you as well; this isn’t your round, you’re next, and that’s it for employment at the cartel of corporate media masquerading as journalism.
There’s no one left to manage.
You can pivot and strategize and have a wacky shirt day every fifth Friday all you like, but the shareholders expect manager salaries to go toward, well … people with reports, or even reports with reports. That’s the best! That two-rung-up thing where you can look at the big picture of your own career and pull up that pesky ladder someone put down there.
Anyway, they get sacked. Not politically important enough. Maybe one more layer depending on org. Then it’s all fingerpointing about who fucked up, and then likely some sort of shareholder bailout, golden parachutes for the victors and a search for the next thing slightly behind on the enshittification scale to wheedle into.
It happens fast from here, folks.
