The generative AI comes in many ways. However, more and more, it is marketed in the same way: with human names and characters that make it feel less like the code and more as a co -worker. An increasing number of startups is anthropomorphize AI to generate trust quickly, and soften its threat to human work. It is dehumanizing and accelerates.
I understand why this framing took off. In the current economy, where each hiring feels like a risk, business startups, many emergent Of the famous accelerator and combinator, they are launching not as software but but As staff. They are selling replacements. AI assistants. IA codores. IA employees. The language is deliberately designed to attract overwhelmed hiring managers.
Some do not even bother with subtlety. AtlogFor example, he recently presented a “AI employee for furniture stores” that handles everything from payments to marketing. A good manager, he gloats, can now run 20 stores at the same time. The involvement: you do not need to hire more people, just let the system scale for you. (What happens to the 19 managers he replaces is left without saying).
New consumer -oriented companies are inclined to similar tactics. Anthrope appointed his “Claude” platform because he is a warm and reliable partner for an incorporeal and faceless neuronal network. It is a tactic directly from the Fintech play book where applications such as Dave, Albert and Charlie masked their transactional motifs with accessible names. When driving money, it feels better to trust a “friend.”
The same logic has infiltrated AI. Do you prefer to share confidential data with an automatic learning model or your best friend Claude, who reminds you, greets you hot and hardly ever threatens you? (For Openai credit, it still tells you that you are chatting with a “previously trained generative transformer”).
But we are reaching a turning point. I am really excited about generative AI. Even so, every new “AI employee” has begun to feel more dehumanizing. Every new “Devin“It makes me ask me when the world’s real Devins go back to be abstracted in employment displacement bots.
The generative AI is no longer just a curiosity. Its scope is expanding, even if the impacts are still clear. In mid -May, 1.9 million unemployed Americans received unemployed continuous benefits, the highest since 2021. Many of them were fired technological workers. The signals are accumulating.
Some of us still remember 2001: A space odyssey. Hal, the computer on board, begins as a quiet and helpful assistant before becoming completely homicidal and cutting the life support of the crew. It is science fiction, but hit a nerve for a reason.
Last week, CEO Anthrope Dario Amodei predicted that AI could eliminate half of the white -level white collar jobs in the following one to five yearspushing unemployment of up to 20%. “Most [of these workers are] without knowing that this is about to happen ”, He told Axios. “It sounds crazy, and people simply do not believe it.”
It could be argued that it is not comparable to cutting someone’s oxygen, but the metaphor is not that very far. Automatizing more people out of payment will have consequences, and when the dismissals increase, the brand of AI as “colleague” will look less intelligent and more insensitive.
The change towards generative AI is occurring regardless of how it is packaged. But companies have an option on how they describe these tools. IBM never called his “Digital Work” co -workers. The PCs were not “software assistants”; They were work stations and productivity tools.
Language still matters. The tools must empower. But more and more companies are marketing something completely, and that feels like an error.
We do not need more “employees” of AI. We need software that extends the potential of real humans, making them more productive, creative and competitive. So stop talking about false workers. Simply show us the tools that help excellent managers to manage complex businesses, and that help people have more impact. That is all that someone really is asking.