kibiz0r@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
This is a terrible idea for Amazon, the cloud services company.
But for Amazon, the AI company? This is them illustrating the new grift that almost any company can do: use AI to keep a plausible mirage of your company going while reducing opex, and sacrifice humans when necessary to dodge accountability.
But his job wasn’t even to supervise the chatbot adequately (single-handedly fact-checking 10 lists of 15 items is a long, labor-intensive process). Rather, it was to take the blame for the factual inaccuracies in those lists. He was, in the phrasing of Dan Davies, “an accountability sink” (or as Madeleine Clare Elish puts it, a “moral crumple zone”).