Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 42
"It should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by nonconsensually extracting their data for the purposes of AI training."
Why? Why shouldn't companies that develop and train AIs be permitted to require their employees to help accomplish the company's goals? Strip the dumb claims about exploitation and consent, they don't apply and were only inserted to provoke an emotional response.
I think the key here is consent . If I started working at a company and such monitoring was not the norm/expectation/condition under which the offer was made, then my very reasonable expectation is that such monitoring is not part of the work product I am providing the company. Unilateral modification of a contract can be legal ("not a lawyer") but certainly isn't ethical without additional disclosure(s). It is therefore very reasonable that if one party is modifying a contract unilaterally, that some degree of compensation be required to offset the additional constraints/work products/expectations being imposed.
That said, if such monitoring was the disclosed expectation under which an offer was made and accepted, I think I'd pretty much agree with your point.