Big companies use AI to monitor in-house communications
In 1984, George Orwell defined “thoughtcrime” as beliefs and positions that conflict with the dominant ideology of Oceania, a fictional superstate that unites North America, South America, the British Isles, Australasia, and Southern Africa. The story was written between 1946 and 1949, and published shortly afterwards; being an anti-utopia narrative, the book takes real-world phenomena to the extreme. However, it turned out that reality can strike back, with a vengeance.
The news of an AI monitoring and analyzing internal communications in a corporate messenger, including DMs, with the aim at flagging risks, naturally makes you remember “thoughtcrime,” and it can’t be helped.
Employee monitoring AI tools: Good intentions and valid concerns
Behind-the-scenes at Aware (allegedly, totally unverified)
The system is developed by Aware, an independent software startup. It can be used with all the major internal communication tools: Microsoft Teams, Slack, Webex, Zoom, Meta’s Workplace, etc.
Aware calls its suite a “contextual intelligence platform for enterprises.” So far, the company has managed to get a number of Fortune 500 companies on board, including Starbucks, Chevron, T-Mobile, Walmart, and Delta. All of them run payrolls with thousands upon thousands of entries, and accidents do happen, which makes their desire to peek inside the brains of their employees understandable.
According to Jeff Schumann, Aware’s co-founder and CEO, the primary purposes of the tools are
- to gauge reactions of employees to various initiatives of their employer, and
- to detect potentially harmful behavior that may entail bullying, harassment, and other manifestations of the dark side of office life.
The former is about worker-company interactions and ways to improve them, as it would seem, but the latter, while positioned as a tool for good, has an edge of a punishing sword that’s wielded by a child, as acknowledged by AI and HR experts. The major concern is that large language models are still not mature enough to make sound, justified decisions about the real risk associated with this or that line of behavior. Some companies using the software have explicitly stated that there’s no decision-making involved, but it’s easy to picture an overworked HR manager who goes with AI suggestions without learning the details of the case.
On a larger scale, this sort of system looks like another nail in the coffin of privacy. Regardless of what you feel about this subject, it is likely that Aware will see a lot of competition in the near future, so adopting some self-control routines in the domain of online communications, corporate and otherwise, may be a good idea, since an incarnation of the Orwellian Big Brother is very much a reality nowadays.
And while privacy is likely dead, and we should get over it, there's no reason to not use software that at least puts you to the safe side in the digital realm. Check out the personal security section of Informer's extensive useful software database:
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