When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it’s mostly fixing what artificial intelligence breaks.
The internal AI tool she’s expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like “trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused”.
“I and many of my colleagues don’t feel that it actually makes us that much faster,” Dina said. “But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.”
Just days after speaking to the Guardian, Dina was laid off.
Lisa, a supply chain engineer who has worked at Amazon for over a decade, says that AI tools at work have been helpful to her only in about one in every three attempts. And even then, she often finds issues and has to consult with colleagues to verify and correct their results, which takes up more time than if she’s done the task without AI.
She doesn’t take issue with the AI tools themselves, but rather the company’s logic in pushing all employees to use them daily. “You don’t look at the problem and go, ‘How do I use this hammer I have?’ she said. “You look at it and go, ‘Is this a problem for a hammer or something else?’”
More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of professional repercussions.
“We have hundreds of thousands of corporate employees in a wide range of roles across many different businesses, each of which is using AI in different ways to learn about what works best for their use cases,” Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said. “While different employees may have different experiences, what we hear from the vast majority of our teams is that they’re getting a lot of value out of the AI tools that they use day-to-day.”
This pressure comes as Amazon has laid off 30,000 workers in the last four months – nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate workforce. Its cuts are part of a wave of recent AI-connected tech layoffs, including at Block, Pinterest and Autodesk. Exactly how much these companies will be able to rely on AI to replace headcount is unclear, and each company has given an array of sometimes contradictory reasons for…
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