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A lawyer was working at a legal tech startup when her boss’s fascination with AI began to veer from enthusiastic to downright obsessive.
First he started using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate his Slack messages and emails. Then he mandated AI use for all employees.
“He called a company-wide meeting to announce that from then on, we had to discuss with the AI prior to all meetings or before communicating with him,” she told Futurism, “because if we didn’t develop and discuss our ideas with the AI first, it was a sign that we didn’t care about our jobs.”
Soon her boss started “making structural company decisions based solely on his conversations with ChatGPT,” the attorney recalled — including asking the bot who to hire and fire.
The boss had “clearly developed some sort of mental disorder,” she said. “Spending the whole day talking to ChatGPT and making decisions about the future of your company and the people who work there based on what it ‘tells’ you seems insane.”
The boss was also using AI for surveillance. He purchased a handful of paid ChatGPT subscriptions for the office, said the lawyer, which allowed him to “monitor our communication with the AI.”
“He paid like three Pro subscriptions that everyone had logins for access,” she explained.
But employees quickly realized that they were also able to view their boss’s conversations with the chatbot through the paid accounts, and they started to fanatically spy on his AI conversations, too — especially as they realized he was asking it to make personnel decisions.
Staffers “would monitor the conversations our boss was having with ChatGPT,” said the lawyer, “to find out who was going to be fired and who was going to be promoted.”
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