Meta Sued for Allegedly Using AI to Lay Off Employees on Leave
The organization introduced its AI employee-monitoring program earlier this year to capture workers’ keystrokes, mouse activity, browser history, messages, emails, and location data on company devices.
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[Image: Nomita Samaiyar/MITSMR Middle East]
A group of Meta employees has filed a lawsuit against the social media giant, claiming the company used an artificial intelligence system to disproportionately select people for layoffs, instead of assembling “the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work.”
Targeting those on medical, parental, or family leave, the company, the lawsuit says, used internal AI systems, keystroke and activity-monitoring data, AI token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically-assisted performance rankings to determine who would be laid off. According to the lawsuit, several of the scores and ratings were designed so that they “cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability.”
“The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves,” read the 71-page complaint filed in federal court in the Northern District of California. The 26 affected workers alleged Meta used AI systems “to score, rank and select employees for inclusion on the list”.
The 26 are among the 8,000 employees Meta announced it would let go in May. Among them was a scientist on pre-birth pregnancy leave who was notified of the layoff two days before giving birth.
“These claims lack merit and are not based on facts,” a Meta spokesperson said to the Guardian. “Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.”
The Mark Zuckerberg-led organization introduced its AI employee-monitoring program earlier this year to capture workers’ keystrokes, mouse activity, browser history, messages, emails, and location data on company devices.
“The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things,” Zuckerberg said, according to The Information. “The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people you can get to do tasks if you’re working through [third-party] contractors.”
The lawsuit further claims Meta launched the program without employee buy-in. The plaintiffs will remain Meta employees until July 22, after which their terminations will take effect.
Meanwhile, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has hinted at a near future in which limits on Meta employees’ AI token spending will become necessary.
“I think that you can imagine, at least in a year or two … that the burn rate of a strong engineer might be the same as their salary, or their cost of employment. And in that world, you’re going to probably need to put in some caps,” the Meta executive said on a podcast.
AI token spend — the consumption-based cost companies incur for every unit of text or code processed by LLMs — has become a hot topic in recent days. Recently, Palo Alto CEO Nikesh Arora shared that the next phase of enterprise AI adoption will depend on dramatically reducing the cost of using it.
