TikTok lays off hundreds of employees as their jobs are automated by artificial intelligence
TikTok is firing content moderators, replacing them with AI, a week before employees were scheduled to vote on union organizing.
TikTok is firing content moderators, replacing them with AI, a week before employees were scheduled to vote on union organizing.
The layoffs at TikTok will mostly affect members of the 2,500-person team based in the UK, although many in South and Southeast Asia will also be affected, Techspot writes .
The cuts will affect around 300 staff in the Trust and Security department in London.
The move is part of a broader global restructuring that will see operations concentrated in regional hubs such as Lisbon and Dublin. TikTok also plans to integrate AI into its moderation system.
This comes a week before workers at the London office were due to vote on whether to unionise. Sources say the company’s management has resisted the move, leading to accusations of unionisation by the CWU.
John Chadfield, national organiser of the CWU, told The Financial Times that TikTok «doesn’t want human moderators, their goal is to have artificial intelligence do it all.»
TikTok has reported that over 85% of content removed from its platform for violating its rules is detected and removed by artificial intelligence.
This isn’t the first time TikTok has decided that AI can moderate the platform’s content better than humans. Last year, the company laid off 500 employees in Malaysia and replaced them with AI.
Just in August, it became known about the cuts at Cisco and Oracle. All of them are related to AI.
There has also been a wave of layoffs this summer in the cloud computing divisions of Amazon AWS and Microsoft .
In addition, Intel will cut 24,000 employees by the end of the year, and also plans to scale back operations in several countries.
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