this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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144
The creepy AI-driven surveillance that may be infiltrating your workplace (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The idea behind the tech was noble: The EAI was supposed to mitigate bias and spot ideal candidates by identifying soft skills, cognitive ability, psychological traits, and emotional intelligence during video interviews.

This is nonsensical. Remove the bias from traits specifically in the domain of human experience (soft skills), and take the humans out of the equation?

Derive cognitive ability from facial expressions?

Remove bias by... Using an AI model that will CERTAINLY be biased?

I'm so torn over if the more proper analogy is "snake oil" or "phrenology"

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

I'm going to guess without even reading the article or knowing anything about the tech that, "for some reason," it doesn't seem to work for people of color and underrates them significantly.

(I mean, aside from the fact that this whole concept is batshit insane phrenology horseshit)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Derive cognitive ability from facial expressions?

Phrenology 2.0

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Phrenology?! Who are you, George Combe??

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

may? its been here for awhile. they already have the data. your work machine is already being monitored for basic telemetry/metrics. they are just getting better at analysis and commoditization of tech so it can reach the masses (re:small business) cheaply.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yep.

I've been in enterprise IT for decades, with friends in SMB IT, and we often discuss the ongoing migration of enterprise grade stuff (hardware, software, processes, paradigms, etc) to the SMB space.

Some is good (like management/leadership, team building, etc. You know, the soft skills in this article). Other stuff can be problematic. Cloud-everything for example. Vendors (looking at you, MS), have painted SMB into a corner with licensing so cloud looks much more attractive.

What SMB management often ignores is now your business can be held hostage by your cloud provider, who, while they may claim your data is encrypted, are certainly surveilling everything that isn't. When they decide to raise rates, or remove features, what are you going to do?

God, I'd love to create a competitor to Quickbooks in the OSS space.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's off-topic for this thread, but as a fellow IT professional, the incessant push to cloud-ify everything is frustrating as hell. It's like all concepts of "does this make sense for my use case?" no longer exist. Cloud is NOT always better, and I'd argue that in many instances, it is just plain worse than going with a local, on-prem solution.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

We're very much on the same page. Seeing the SMB's get sucked into cloud because on-prem has hardware costs is really frustrating. I blame bean-counter, because hardware is a capital expenditure and cloud is like leasing something.

The short-term financials look good, but disregards the risks and costs of going to cloud. That my SMB IT friends don't make this more clear to their clients is really frustrating.

Backup is a great use-case for cloud, you address the risk of local problems, so I get that. But office 365/email/outlook? No thanks. But MS just makes it so much cheaper/easier, especially for SMB.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Agreed on all points. Backup is indeed often a great candidate for cloud. Like you said, it's usually cheaper and safer in the long run and addresses all the checklist items you'd have to implement locally for redundancies and security.

All these vendors forcing us to move to a rent based economy is tiresome.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

most importantly, surveillance of your employees should be illegal altogether. it already is in germany. (well kind of, you can't use surveillance footage as evidence to fire someone)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Interesting that video isn't allowed. Like, someone walks into a server room and literally steals servers in plain view. (This actually happened where I worked... We didn't have cameras so I guess you can still catch a person doing that kind of thing)

That said, I would love to see workplace surveillance outlawed. Particularly constant productivity monitoring.

Warning: rant imminent

If you do the work on time, what's the problem? If I happen to have a day where I am not feeling it and play solitaire for 8 hours, yet I deliver everything expected on time of good quality... Who cares?

That level of surveillance is demeaning, overbearing, and demoralizing.

Companies have way too goddamn much power in the US. Like, we have all this freedom^1 outside of work but at work it's a fucking fiefdom run by autocratic pricks and their middle management minions.

  1. Terms and conditions apply. Offer fully redeemable for citizens with highest levels of power and wealth. Exceptions may apply including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, sexual preference, political affiliation, disability, illness. Offer valid only until election of hyper-capitalist fascists, societal collapse from climate change, or the whims of the billionaire elite.
[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

you can still use the video footage as evidence for theft. and then you can fire the person based on that. but firing a person because they don't look busy enough isn't allowed.

and i absolutely agree that workplace surveillance is a dick move. there's supposed to be a certain level of trust that your employee is going to do the work on time.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There's this bit in Snow Crash where Federal employees get a memo with an expected reading time, knowing the manager will review their reading times and update their personnel files (and opinions) based on those values, so the workers would skim the memo but mind their reading time.

Micromanagement is how you make your workplace toxic, even if your managers like the power.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

That data is then used for a wide variety of applications, such as detecting when someone may be lying about insurance claims, helping diagnose depression, and tracking how students are responding to a teacher during online learning.

Gabi Zijderveld, the chief marketing officer of Smart Eye, an EAI company that claims its tech "understands, supports, and predicts human behavior," said the firm had amassed vast amounts of emotion-based data by analyzing over 14.5 million videos of facial expressions it made with voluntary participants.

In these cases, paid participants watch online videos, and their facial expressions are analyzed by EAI technology to determine whether a joke in an ad was funny or whether a particular moment in a movie trailer elicited the emotional response it was meant to.

The idea behind the tech was noble: The EAI was supposed to mitigate bias and spot ideal candidates by identifying soft skills, cognitive ability, psychological traits, and emotional intelligence during video interviews.

In response to public outcry, the company said in 2021 it would stop the use of EAI facial analysis because it wasn't worth the concern but would continue analyzing speech, intonation, and behavior during interviews.

Kat Roemmich, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan School of Information who has conducted research on EAI, has found that employees frequently remain unaware that their company is using the tech while they're on the job.

The original article contains 2,089 words, the summary contains 232 words. Saved 89%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I like how this looks like Bill Gates where there's 'nother article of him extolling all these things he's almost conceptually antithetical to