These days, corporations aren’t just using AI as an excuse to justify layoffs, but are increasingly turning to their chatbots for advice deciding who to fire.
As Reuters reports, 26 Meta employees filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using an internal AI platform to select targets for the thousands of jobs cut earlier this year. Per the suit, Meta used its AI to cull workers based on opaque productivity metrics and large language model (LLM) token usage, a move which disproportionately targeted people with disabilities, and those who had taken maternity or medical leave — literally adding insult to injury.
The 26 plaintiffs, whose names have been redacted from the suit, include engineers, managers, researchers, and designers, as well as a director who had direct access to the AI platform.
Nearly half of the plaintiffs say that their termination was the result of taking either maternity or parental leave, protected activities which Meta’s AI-integrated human resources platform “Checkpoint” allegedly failed to take into consideration. Others claim to have been targeted after taking medical leave for their own disabilities, bereavement leave, or to care for family members.
