^{CHITTER CHATTER}

Trust Collapses When AI Training Potentially Exposes Staff’s Personal Information

According to WIRED, “Meta left potentially sensitive information collected from employee laptops accessible to anyone inside the company …” This is in reference to its controversial ‘Model Capability Initiative’ to train AI. “Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, admitted that the tracking program’s implementation had fallen short of the standards outlined in its privacy review and that findings from the incident would be shared.” Of course, this is the opposite of what he said months earlier to concerned employees worried about potential data leaks, asserting “that the tracking program is ‘tightly controlled’ and uses the same protection standards, storage systems, and access controls as other sensitive datasets, blah, blah, blah. No wonder morale at Meta is in the pits.

Return to Office (RTO) Isn’t Going Well

Apparently, schlepping to the office by car, rail, bus, ferry or camel won’t reward you with the warmth and glow of physical proximity to your colleagues. This report asserts that loneliness in the office is on the rise, even though we’re surrounded by people in a noisy open-plan space where you can’t hear yourself think, and where contact with colleagues is superficial, filled with surface-level conversations. Mostly, we sit at our desks on endless calls, speaking with colleagues in another city. At least there’s free fruit on Mondays, French pastries on Fridays, and you can tune in to the gossip about the nasty marriage breakup of so-and-so. Loneliness and dissatisfaction? Nah.  

Tech Fails

Tools for Inhumanity

Business Insider reported this past week on potentially criminal connections relating to one of Sam Altman’s start-ups, called Tools for Humanity. It’s an eyeball scanning thingamajig that determines whether you’re human or a bot. Ugh. Reminds me of the (original) Blade Runner movie, where Harrison Ford plays a police officer tasked with tracking down and eliminating ‘Replicants’: bioengineered humans created for dangerous off-world labour. I digress. Tools for Humanity’s rollout in Thailand was linked to a South African businessman accused of involvement in transnational cyber fraud. To be clear, there was no impropriety tied to Tools for Humanity in the US, and the company hired a legal team to investigate the misconduct of overseas partners. Regardless, Tools for Humanity sounds like a horrible company requiring employees to work 24/7 and not have a life outside of work. Raising millions of dollars from investors and valued at $2.5 billion in 2023, the start-up is struggling to show “how its iris-scanning ‘orb’ can generate revenue.” That’s because it takes more than workplace serfdom and a history of doing business with shady overseas partners, to become a successful tech company.

^SUBTEXT

The (corporate) Waffle: "We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards, and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees, we're pausing it while we investigate," — Tracy Clayton, Meta Spokesperson

Translation:
We carelessly designed this intrusive AI learning program. While the lawyers have advised us to deny, deny, deny – even though we’ve been caught out and data has escaped without our permission – we’re carefully negotiating our way around not being sued by employees.

A condition affecting tech companies that believe laws, ethics and reality are obstacles designed for less ambitious people. Symptoms: invented capabilities, inflated numbers, misleading demonstrations and executives repeatedly insisting they had no idea what was going on. Advanced symptoms include blaming a rogue employee, an unclear policy or users who apparently misunderstood everything. Side effects: leaked data, regulatory investigations and employee lawsuits. Cure: tell the truth before lawyers have to fabricate a more expensive version of it.

^{THE SHALLOW END}

Tech Leaders Mocked for ‘Kissing Ass’

Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) have been mocked by US President Donald Trump. Apparently, they sought to “ingratiate themselves” with the president after he won the 2024 election. Hm, nothing like delicious public humiliation revealing ‘fawning’ texts, with Zuckerberg (in my opinion) going as low as texting Trump “a photo of a letter written by one of his grade-school-age children, who wrote that they ‘looked forward to the golden age of America,’ a slogan Trump had repeated at rallies during the presidential campaign.” Trump regaled associates with stories of how “Zuckerberg and Bezos were ‘kissing my ass’.” These episodes are detailed in the book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

Anthropic’s CEO Classified as a ‘Weirdo’

“The Trump administration has been happier talking to Anthropic lately”, because they don’t have to deal with CEO Dario Amodei anymore. He’s been replaced in meetings about re-releasing the Claude Fable 5 AI model by his cofounder, Tom Brown. ‘Someone’ was quoted as saying, “Tom Brown is not being a weirdo like Dario and can actually engage.” 😄

Dear Dr Comms
I’m back in the office surrounded by people, yet somehow lonelier than when I worked from home. Everyone spends the day on conference calls somewhere else. The colleague on my left repeatedly blows his nose into the same increasingly disgusting yellowed handkerchief then leaves it displayed on his desk like a small biological weapon. The colleague on my right keeps his sound on, so I hear a Slack notification every two seconds. I feel isolated, my nerves are frazzled, and my anxiety is through the roof. How can I survive being alone with these people? Yours, Chained-to-my-desk prisoner

Dear Chained-to-Desk
Oh the horror! Let’s see how the specialists can help:

🪣 Murder Scene Cleaning Crew
“Go to the kitchen and find some gloves. Put on two pairs, then gently pick up the handkerchief and place it inside an evidence bag for analysis of whatever is growing inside it. Hopefully your colleague will soon be arrested for crimes against humanity.”

🧠 Brain Surgeon:
“I recommend you put that knife back in the kitchen drawer and instead mentally lobotomise your colleagues by droning on and on about the weather, your lunchtime menu and the train timetable. The jerks will either turn into zombies or move on to sit elsewhere.”

🏗️ Warehouse Forklift Driver:
“Put both desks on a pallet and relocate them to the far end of the building. Mark the area ‘Hazardous Materials’ and surround it with orange cones. Then reverse slowly out of there while beeping loudly enough to drown out the static of fake cheerful office chatter.”

^{BIN THIS…}

Nobody knows exactly where it’s being driven, who gave it a licence or whether it can be trusted not to reverse through the finance department.

Know someone who lives for this kind of nonsense? Forward this email to them and help me spread the dysfunction.

You can also subscribe to my other newsletter, Lead Different, for a serious take on strategic communications in B2B tech.