OpenAI's Sam Altman blames 'AI washing' for human layoffs
The AI giant continues to come under fire
If there weren’t already complaints that artificial intelligence was dystopian enough as we have to learn new terms like ‘model inbreeding’ (AI models trained by others), ‘necromarketing’ (using the dead to market products), and ‘promptstitutes’ (a slang term for people who those who sell collections of AI prompts), there’s another we’ve got to learn.
More than this, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is blaming ‘AI washing’ for all those layoffs we keep hearing about.
Artificial intelligence is evolving at breakneck speed, with the big ones like Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI continuing to butt heads with each other, experts, and the general public.
Away from Elon Musk calling ChatGPT ‘evil’ and a #QuitGPT campaign taking off, there have been mounting wrongful death lawsuits against OpenAI.
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Added to this, the various Godfathers of AI and beyond are warning about the rise of AI taking our jobs.
ChatGPT recently predicted that customer service jobs are next on the chopping block, but in the aftermath, Altman has made his dystopian prognosis on AI washing.
Speaking at the India AIImpact Summit on Thursday, Altman told CNBC-TV18 that some companies are using ‘AI washing’ to unfairly blame technology for recent layoffs. The tech mogul explained: “I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs.”
Fortune reports how the term has gained popularity due to ‘muddied’ reports about human layoffs alongside the rise of AI.
A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research said that nearly 90% of C-suite executives from the USA, UK, Germany, and Australia said AI had no impact on workplace employment since ChatGPT was rolled out in November 2022.
Still, even Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has foreshadowed a supposed ‘white-collar bloodbath’ that’s set to eradicate 50% of entry-level office jobs. This is echoed by Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s suggestion that its staff of 3,000 will be reduced by 1,000 by 2030 – all as AI accelerates.
The 2025 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report maintains that around 40% of employers will follow in Klarna’s footsteps as they downsize human employment in favor of AI.
As for the OpenAI boss, Altman reiterated that while displacement is expected because of AI, there will also be the emergence of new roles: “We’ll find new kinds of jobs, as we do with every tech revolution.
“But I would expect that the real impact of AI doing jobs in the next few years will begin to be palpable.”
Speaking to Fortune, Martha Gimbel, executive director and cofounder of the Yale Budget Lab, said that AI washing is used to write off diminishing margins and revenue as a failure navigate this ever-evolving world of tech: “No matter which way you look at the data, at this exact moment, it just doesn’t seem like there’s major macroeconomic effects here.”
As tech bosses are forced to justify their continued investment in AI, some people have created the narrative of AI leading to mass layoffs.
According to economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow, AI expansion could lead to a supposed J-curve that will include an initial slowdown in performance that’s going to be obscured by mass spending, followed by an exponential surge that will affect productivity and labor.
While Atlman continues to downplay the idea of layoffs, AI washing is another term many of us are only just hearing about.