The Guardian: “…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 reductions. Jack Dorsey, the Block CEO, said outright that AI was behind his 40% staffing cuts, while Pinterest and Autodesk said they were redirecting investments to AI. Amazon has waffled in explaining how AI factors into its layoff decisions, saying both that it would lead to reductions, but that recent cuts weren’t AI-driven. The company said in February it would spend some $200bn this year on AI infrastructure and announced a $50bn investment in OpenAI…”