Employers use AI to monitor staff who also don’t benefit from the tech, conference hears

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by employers to more closely monitor their staff to make them more productive, a trade union organised conference in Dublin has heard.The event was organised by the Communications Workers Union (CWU) in response to what was felt to be a lack of union or civil society voices at this Wednesday’s Government-organised AI Summit in the RDS.Canadian critic and author Paris Marx told the conference AI technology was often used for surveillance of one type or another on staff, while the quality of work being done by workers was being degraded with consequences for pay.“What’s happening varies across different sectors,” he said. “We see in graphic design settings and translation settings, it’s not always that people are being actually replaced by AI but often it’s that people who would have done the initial work – and been paid well – are now being relegated to editing an AI-generated piece of translation or image.READ MORE“Because they are not the original creator they are being paid a lot less despite the fact that the work can take just as long or longer to do.”Marx said moves are also afoot in some sectors, such as the legal profession, to “completely eliminate” a lot of entry level roles and work.He said this was occurring “without much thought for what will happen in 10 to 15 years when the people who would have done that work will be needed to replace more senior lawyers who are retiring”.“So we need to be concerned not just about the jobs that are being or might be lost but also about the way jobs are changing,” he said.[ Who’s hiring and who’s firing in Ireland’s technology sector?Opens in new window ]Commenting on the AI-related findings in the Working In Ireland survey, Demitrios Argyros said the results suggested a majority of people using AI at work felt it resulted in them doing more complex or creative work.A consequence of this, he said, is they felt the parts of their day when they were doing easier tasks or basic admin had been reduced and so their working day had become more intense, leaving them more drained by their day’s work.[ AI bubble? Nvidia is now bigger than Japan, but valuation looks modestOpens in new window ]“They feel they work more and do higher value work but they are not getting more pay or time off so there is a sense the productivity gains are all going to the employer when they could be shared through shorter hours, reduced workloads or investment on worker development,” he said.The event was also told State agencies here and public bodies were becoming too dependent on a handful of huge American corporations at a time when Donald Trump has suggested he regards their AI and software products as a tool of his foreign policy.That tech, Abeba Birhane of Trinity College suggested, was built on what even a Microsoft insider had described as a massive theft of other people’s work.Patrick Bresnihan, of Maynooth University, said the construction resources employed to build data centres in Ireland since 2019 would have been sufficient to provide 50,000 houses.Ian McArdle, of the CWU, said: “You cannot have a serious conversation about the future of AI and work without the people who do that work. “The conference was about ensuring workers have a voice in the shaping of the future of AI rather than simply having to live with the consequences.”