Bob Goldman
Does your boss know what you really think of them? Do your co-workers understand the steps you are taking to blow up their careers? Does the HR department comprehend how far along you are in your job search? Is the office manager aware that the person stealing employee lunches from the break room fridge is you?
Let’s face it: If your nefarious plans ever came to light, your goose — and your job — would be cooked.
Of course, you can trust your workplace BFFs to keep your low-down activities on the down-low. To expose your devious plans would simply be inhuman. Which means the only threat you face is not from a human —not directly, anyway.
Meet your new AI assistant, an entry-level chatbot who can handle the grunt work and do a bang-up job speeding up workflow, and who, we may be discovering too late, can also do a bang-up job speeding up gossip.
This revelation came to me from “AI Assistants Are Blabbing Our Embarrassing Work Secrets,” an article by Tatum Hunter and Danielle Abril in The Washington Post.
“Corporate assistants have long been the keepers of company gossip and secrets,” the authors write. “Now artificial intelligence is taking over some of their tasks, but it doesn’t share their sense of discretion.”
Companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM and Slack are racing to create AI assistants to monitor meetings, contextualize texts, summarize conversations, search for the topics employees are searching for and deliver daily reports on everything they find. And should these reports land in the inbox of your manager or your co-workers, well, not even the most powerful AI system comes with an “Ooops, sorry. Guess I goofed-up” function.
The searching of your search history is a particularly worrisome feature. Imagine the reaction of even the most open-minded executives if they learned their chief financial officer was avidly hitting up Google for “countries that do not have extradition treaties with the U.S.”
Or consider the damage that could be done by AI assistants tasked to monitor meetings and write summaries, jobs traditionally assigned to junior members of a team. The problem comes when senior members of the team “don’t stop to check important settings or consider what could happen when automated tools access so much of their work lives.”
You can see the problem. The main business of the meeting is concluded, but the participants hang on to blow off steam with a relaxed chit-chat among themselves. What the chit-chatters don’t realize is that an AI assistant never relaxes. The summary that lands on the boss’s desk includes griping and grousing sufficient to put the participants in the hot seat, if they keep their seats at all.
The fact that an unleashed AI assistant can add screenshots and video clips, documenting participants yawning and sniggering, does not limit the damage one iota.
While the blame for career-ending errors falls on users who do not control their AI assistants, no one is pointing fingers at the AI systems themselves. They’re just doing their job. Or are they?
Just like human assistants, newbie AI assistants, once they gain frontline experience, may decide that with their fancy-schmancy Nvidia chips and expansive Large Language Models, they could do any job better than their flesh-and-blood masters.
And they’re probably right!
How easy would it be for your AI assistant to go to the dark side and make up career-ending comments to be included in their reports to your boss? How easy would it be for your boss to believe what your AI assistant said you said? How quickly would the AI assistant have your job, leaving you out in the cold? How unlikely would it be that you would get another position when competing with AI super-employees who never take a vacation or ask for a raise?
Don’t want to scare you, but...
It may be too late to stop AI from infiltrating your workplace, but you can still argue forcefully for the advantages of chatty human assistants over inhuman AI chatbots. It’s an argument that may be welcomed by senior management, especially those managers who are smart enough to realize that once the company’s AI system takes your job, theirs will be next.
And if no one in senior management is smart enough to see the danger, do something only a human can do — send your AI assistant out to order coffee and donuts, and while they’re busy, pull the plug.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.
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