AI technology seems to benefit many users across the world, but there are two sides to every coin. When it comes to AI, there are the customer-facing benefits and there are also the people developing the AI. According to a new report, many employees across the AI industry are experiencing intense burnout while major companies compete to “build a better chatbot.”
Obviously, users across several tech industries have been experiencing long hours and intense shifts for decades. This isn’t something that’s new. However, AI has ushered in a completely new era in technology.
This new era is extremely competitive, as major billion and trillion-dollar companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta are fighting tooth and nail to stay ahead of the competition while satisfying investors. Well, if these companies are the generals, then the poor overworked employees are the soldiers on the front lines.
Many employees in the AI field are experiencing intense burnout
This is a story that highlights the dark side of AI. Every new AI feature on your phone requires hours of work, testing, and trial and error. So, many of the AI tools that people are using to scrape time off of their work shifts sometimes require hundreds of hours of extra work to create.
One employee mentioned a weekend they had lost because a last-minute deadline landed in their lap. They received a message at the end of a Friday shift for a Monday deadline. This is just one example of many people losing many aspects of their lives just so that major companies can continue to build AI models.
This is only made worse by the fact that many large companies seem not to care about the working conditions they’re creating for their workers. As reported by CNBC, many workers are sometimes moved from their normal positions onto AI teams in order to boost productivity in that field. However, they lack training, so they can’t properly acclimate to the conditions.
We’re not quite sure how long this is going to last, as every large company seems to be putting a major focus on AI technology. They spend billions of dollars each year building up AI technology in the hopes that it will become profitable (for example, OpenAI spent $520 million last year). We will just have to wait to see how this whole situation plays out.
