Responsible

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Hello, and welcome to Responsible, by ClearOPS, a newsletter about responsibility in business.

I don’t claim to be the judge and jury. In fact, I dislike it when people think I am judging them. The purpose of this newsletter is to engage in discussion. So let’s do just that.

What I have for you this week:

• Oh no she didn’t! How one CEO goofed when she decided to recognize AI bots as employees

• The deeply ethical questions that GenAI is creating in the death industry

• Caroline’s weekly musings

• My Custom GPT

• How to build an AI Governance program

• AI Snippets

I felt last week was a little light on content so I upped my AI newsfeed and included several more podcasts that I listen to weekly. It was only then that this particular situation was made known to me.

I cannot believe not one single reader of this newsletter mentioned it to me! I do intend for this to be a group discussion. Not a Caroline ranting session. 😉

So here is the story, the CEO of Lattice, Sarah Franklin, announced, “Lattice believes that we need to fully understand what it looks like to integrate AI employees into the workforce to make sure we create transparent, responsible practices around hiring AI. That's why we want to be the first to bring an AI employee through all the same steps as a human one – onboarding, goal setting, receiving feedback…”

As you can imagine the backlash was so fierce that she retracted her statement and the company’s plans.

I mean, we all know the biggest nerve that AI touches is its feared replacement of humans in the workplace, so I guess I am shocked that she did not see the backlash coming. But I do not blame her for trying to raise the discussion. How are we going to track and measure AI that is doing the work of real people?

Or, what I think is more important, how are we making sure those people who were replaced by AI find jobs, can sustain themselves and don’t start suffering from depression, anxiety, etc.? I don’t think we need to humanize AI, as several commented in the LinkedIn post, but I do think we need to keep track of it. What are your thoughts?

Do you remember the 2001 film A.I.? It’s story line focused on a human like AI robot that was created to help a mother cope with a son who had an incurable illness. I suppose the movie was foreshadowing what was to come.

Apparently, in China there are limited publicly available resources for bereavement due to their culture and religious beliefs, so AI avatars of deceased loved ones have become very popular.