If AI Isn’t Ready to Replace Workers, Why Are Companies Cutting Jobs Anyway?

A growing number of experts argue that many companies blaming artificial intelligence for job cuts are masking more familiar financial and strategic pressures.

The good news for employees worried about the countless predictions of a looming job apocalypse from artificial intelligence (AI) taking work away from humans has not been borne out—at least not yet. However, that hasn’t prevented an increasing number of companies from citing productivity gains made by using those task automating apps as the reason for thousands of recent layoffs they’ve made.

But now, a growing chorus of critics have begun denouncing most of those staff reductions as cynical, manipulative “AI-washing” of headcount reductions that employers feel forced to make—and for reasons entirely unrelated to the emerging tech.

Those accusations have grown louder in recent weeks as companies including Amazon, Pinterest, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Meta, and others have announced headcount cuts they’ve either partially or fully attributed to the work automating capabilities of AI. More recently, tech innovator Jack Dorsey explained he was eliminating about 4,000 jobs—or about 40 percent of all positions—at his fintech company Block on the logic “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.”

Shortly after that, software firm followed suit by Atlassian saying it would cut 10 percent of its workforce, or 1,600 people, as AI apps take over departing employees’ work.

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I am fascinated by AI pictures. I don't have a clue how they are done.

They are very easy to create. The ones I have posted here are from Google Gemini, just type Google Gemini in the address bar of any browser or the input of any search engine. Then follow the link. If you have a Google account you can sign in; I think that you might have to, to generate an image. Even a free account gives something like 50 AI credits a day, and most pictures like my Rockwell style images use only 1 or 2 credits. But I think that if you don't sign in that the Chatbot will not do anything that requires a credit.

So, after creating a free Google account, you just key in your prompt in the box under “How can I help you?”. The prompt that I used for the image in this thread was “create a rockwell style image of an ai robot father getting into a vintage car to commute to his office job.”

The image that I got back first had only the dad shown as a robot, so I went on to ask for the mom, the boy, and the dog to be robots as well. Then I asked for a robot cat to be added.

In a few seconds an image shows up, and you can download the image by hovering over the top right corner of the picture and left clicking on the download button that appears.

There are lots of other tricks that you can use in your prompts to improve your results, but I thought that these images turned out pretty well without any fancy stuff.

I have to admit that I have been trying out Google AI Pro which gives 5TB of Google Drive for $2.99 a month which gives me more images than I would ever use in a day along with quite a few other benefits that I have not been taking advantage of. Next month it will revert to its normal $19.95 a month, so I will probably dump it.

Respectfully submitted, I wholeheartedly disagree. I've leveraged LLM to do some pretty complex CodeGen.

The problem is not that it can't or won't do it... the problem is that it typically takes a few tries to get it right along with sometimes a lot of trouble shooting. And then depending on your level of experience you might end up with something that is hard to sort out later if you decide you need to modify it.

Because they saw Elon Musk cut 80% of the employees at Twitter/X and the company didn’t miss a beat, and realized that they were way over staffed with useless people.

************

Exactly.

The private & public sector bloat in large corporate bureaucracies has been growing for 50 years, with very little contributions to any gains in productivity or efficiency.

Smart businesses whether big or small will retain their old producers and train new ones.

Stupid businesses will continue to waste money on nonproductive endeavors until they eventually “pay the piper” into financial ruin.

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