Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back
Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back
Years after outsourcing marketing and customer service gigs to AI, the Swedish company Klarna is looking to hire its humans back.
I thought this was an onion article until I checked the comments
Ah yes, Klarna. The proof that not everything is all right with Sweden. Proof that Nordic countries, too, are capable of incredibly dark things. ...Do I need to continue?
Capitalistic assholes are everywhere. As long as you keep them in check, you can build a good system.
Sweden is one of the main exporters of Neoliberalism outside of its own borders.
Now, the company says it imagines an "Uber-type of setup" to fill their ranks, with gig workers logging in remotely to argue with customers from the comfort of their own homes.
So they're using their spectacular failure as a chance to exploit their new 'employees' via the gig economy.
Fuck them. They have learned nothing about respect or decency, and I hope they continue to crash and burn.
So they're using their spectacular failure as a chance to exploit their new 'employees' via the gig economy.
To the ruling class this was always the true lucrative appeal of A.I. and is precisely why they were willing to make such massive bets on a fundamentally broken technology.
The cherry on top is tech work used to be a threat to big businesses, especially big tech companies, because society considered tech work to be a respectable job. Big businesses/oligarchs saw this as an obstacle to destroying tech work as a decent paying career and A.I. was the perfect tool of propaganda to remove the obstacle because even most tech workers bought the lies hook line and sinker.
Loans for consumer products should be outlawed. Nothing good ever comes out of them.
And how many of these Uberserfs will be located in developed countries making good salaries? None, you say?
Probably depends on the language in the target market, a lot of European languages are not that common in countries with cheap labor.
AI consumes way too much electricity and requires too much human attention (ironically) to be a viable replacement for most jobs. It can do simple stuff, but it's not ready to operate like a human in most cases.
LLMs can do a lot of cool stuff that humans can't but also can't do a lot of stuff very well that humans can do a lot better.
Reverse onion. I thought this was satire at first.
For any change, AI or no, why would you take out part of your existing company before confirming that the new thing works for the new role?
because for a short time this allows for wild speculation in your favour and you can collect your bonus and secure a higher paying job elsewhere before reality hits and someone else gets to clean the mess
Because they're stupid and/or cheap. Remember the guys at the top usually got to their position through ass kissing or otherwise are bound to ass-kissers.
Often even functional companies are in effect run by rank and file people paid almost nothing who know their particular aspects of the job very well. They are managed by people who as your rank rises know less and less about the actual work that makes the company run. This works fine when nothing major changes but when you ask people incapable of doing the job to make major strategic to the enterprise that they don't understand shockingly it goes poorly.
workers should demand that the AI become the CEO, the President, and the Board of Directors' supervisor.
Now, the company says it imagines an "Uber-type of setup" to fill their ranks, with gig workers logging in remotely to argue with customers from the comfort of their own homes.
Alternate headline: "Identity thieves salivating at prospects of gain unvetted positions at consumer financial company"
Klarna: Fire Now, Pay Later.
The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded its marketing contracts in 2023, followed by its customer service team in 2024, which it proudly began replacing with AI agents.
A few months after freezing new hires, Klarna bragged that it saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. It likewise claimed that its automated customer service agents could do the work of "700 full-time agents."
As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, "cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality."
Also, just want to recognize this gem:
Though executives in every industry, from news media to fast food, seem to think AI is ready for the hot seat — an attitude that's more grounded in investor relations than an honest assessment of the tech — there are growing signs that robot chickens are coming home to roost.
I'm sure the conclusion of this will be "AI bad" like usual when in reality a complete idiot with no understanding of AI was leading the project.
AI will replace part of our jobs whether people like it or not. But the CEO of the business is a moron so he did his special move and replaced people instead of tasks.
Every CEO thinks like this. CEOs are so incredibly bullish on AI BECAUSE they want to replace people and not tasks.
its no wonder the only clientele of AI are CEOs and csuites, and corporations, thats why they dont generate profit, because regular customers dont need it or want it, its not as useful as it seems.
AI of some kind will replace parts of our jobs, but LLM chatbots won't except in some specific cases. This is just a hype bubble.
AI in the hands of moron CEOs is bad. (And they're all morons)
LLMs can be useful in extremely limited circumstances. The problem is that idiots like this are going to use them to replace employees and consumers will receive worse products and services because of it.
Tried explaining to a friend that works at Facebook. That the company is a failure. And I s basically just Ai accounts manipulating the dumbest of the population.
This seems to be a lie, there are no customer service positions available on Klarna's career page.
They also have zero US based roles available. Canada and europe only.
Now, the company says it imagines an "Uber-type of setup" to fill their ranks, with gig workers logging in remotely to argue with customers from the comfort of their own homes.
They are likely hiring through an agency to avoid paying benefits
Collectively, we as people should stop utilizing a parasitic organization. Imagine corporations not giving jobs out yet expecting people to use their service/product.
Realistically they will hire someone in the dominican republic or some other nation with fairly neutral english accents on a call center farm who end up getting paid way under US minimum wage.
Tons of companies do this. Choice hotels, boost mobile... many many more.
Alternatively those gig workers will get paid even less than DR wages and be from far worse countries. Those DR call center farms literally do not allow you to bring any personal belongings onto the floor, or take anything from the floor. Way too easy to steal financial information if you can write it down somewhere. Now imagine gig workers who work remotely and how they could handle financial data... doesn't seem feasible but maybe they have the liability angle figured out.
AI can be a useful tool and I think it will slowly become more common in the workplace, for example it can be very convenient for knowledge retrieval, but it's laughable to think that it can replace humans. I'd wager any time "AI" can replace a human the job could've already been automated through other means.
LLMs are absolute garbage for knowledge retrieval.
Generalized LLMs like ChatGPT are. If you train a model on your own documentation then all it “knows” is what is in the docs and it can perform very well at finding relevant results. It’s just kind of a context-aware search engine at that point.
The problem again is that companies mostly aren’t doing that, they’re trying to replace humans with ChatGPT.
It's not true.
Vector dbs and LLMs are really powerful at knowledge retrieval.
See notebooklm and open-source alternative.
They are "media transformers" and might be useful if limited to it.
Knowledge retrieval certainly not, as "they" know nothing besides how likely one data fragment is to appear near other data fragments.
Perhaps I'm using the wrong terminology. But being able to ask in natural language "why is something the way it is" and it returns references to code, bugs, and documentation along with a small summary is pretty cool. It works better than any of the half-baked corporate search engines I've used before. Is this not "knowledge retrieval"? In any case I can see the utility.
Is it because they realized that you can't pick on an LLM?
🤦♂️