Week in review: Meta’s AI systems ‘disproportionately’ selected certain workers for layoffs

Meta, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the best way to handle layoffs was to let AI decide who stays and who goes. Because nothing says 'compassionate downsizing' like an algorithm that's probably been trained on Reddit threads about productivity. The result? Workers who took protected leave—maternity, disability, the sort of thing that's legally supposed to be safe—were 'disproportionately' shown the door. Well done, Meta. You've outsourced discrimination to a black box.

Let's be clear: this isn't a bug, it's a feature. The AI was presumably optimising for something—attendance, perhaps, or 'butts in seats' metrics. If you're off sick, you're not in the seat. So the algorithm, being a faithful little pattern-matching machine, flagged the absent. That Meta apparently didn't think to filter for legally protected absences is either staggering incompetence or willful blindness. Both are on brand.

And what's the recourse? Former workers are alleging—but good luck proving intent when the decision-maker is a neural network. Meta will throw up its hands: 'We didn't mean to discriminate, the model did it!' Classic. The regulatory gap here is wide enough to drive a data centre through, and the only thing being disrupted is workers' lives. But hey, at least the AI was efficient.