Only 75 out of 287,000 layoffs this year attributed to AI replacement, yet further down, IBM alone has replaced "hundreds" of HR employees with AI. Which is it?

Absolute trash article. Any vague gesture in the direction of a fact is poorly defined with no sources. This should only increase skepticism towards AI replacing writers and journalists.

Capital Economics analysts warned that some firms use AI as cover for cuts driven by poor financial performance. “For some firms, AI is a way to spin job losses driven by poor financial performance in a more positive light,” they wrote.

The AI job apocalypse narrative serves multiple purposes: it justifies hiring freezes, explains away poor financial performance, and creates urgency around AI adoption.

I suspected as much too: that the people in-charge are using AI as a scapegoat so that the anger that would have been directed at them gets turned towards AI instead.

Given that there's a vocal minority of Lemmings who blindly hate AI, I'd say their propaganda has definitely found at least some success.

yet further down, IBM alone has replaced "hundreds" of HR employees with AI. Which is it?

The article is implying that claims like these are bogus, no?

AI is changing how work gets done, but not eliminating entire roles. At IBM, “a couple hundred” HR workers were replaced by AI agents, CEO Arvind Krishna told The Wall Street Journal in May.

While we have done a huge amount of work inside IBM on leveraging AI and automationon certain enterprise workflows, our total employment has actually gone up, because what it does is it gives you more investment to put into other areas,” Krishna said.

The company used AI savings to hire more programmers and salespeople.

so they did fire a couple hundred HR people, but claim that allowed them to hire more people in other areas. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well, for now yes, but who knows what will happen next?

Well, let's see what happens next. Sometimes it seems to me that I live in some kind of novel, and not the most rosy one, apparently in the dystopian genre just before the main events begin lol.

Well, they can say anything, for example, I am a flying wizard on a broomstick, I answer, I don’t lie.

AI : Actually India

I'm having a thought now.

Each time we see "company laid off X employees to replace them with AI". Is it really to replace them with AI or is it just layoff because we are in recession that are disguised with AI to make it sound better ?

What kind of source is GazeOn? Based off the top menu items, looks like a pro-AI rag. Biased source.

To give them an ounce of credit, there are many factors that would prevent any sort of accurate reporting on those numbers. To take that credit away, they confidently harp on their own poorly sourced number of 75.

Whether AI is explicitly stated as the cause, or even effective at the job functions its attempting to replace is irrelevant. Businesses are plowing ahead with it and it is certainly resulting in job cuts, to say nothing of the interference its causing in the hiring process once you're unemployed.

We need to temper our fears of an AI driven world, but we also need to treat the very real and observable consequences of it as the threat that it is.

I was recently swimming in that thought soup, myself.

In reality, the truth is somewhere in between. Yes, AI is taking real jobs right now, not a speculative future, but so are the economic issues.

There are just so many people suffering. Young and old, there's not a demographic untouched by it. Plenty of blame to go around, for sure.

I remember the times when people used to say, well, let's talk when a computer beats a human in chess. After Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, everyone started saying, oh, it's all nonsense, just a set of algorithms. The wheel of 'betrayal-victory'... )

The issue here is that human intelligence and computer intelligence work completely different and things that are easy for one are hard for the other.

Because of that, measures of intelligence don't really work across humans and computers and it's really easy to misjudge which milestones are meaningful and which aren't.

For example, it's super hard for a human to perform 100 additions within a second, and a human who could do that would be perceived as absolutely super human. But for a computer that's ridiculously easy. While on the other hand there are things a child can do that were impossible for computers just a few years ago (e.g. reckognizing a bird).

(Relevant, if slightly outdated, XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/)

For humans, playing high-level chess is really hard, so we arbitrarily chose it as a measure of intelligence: "Only very intelligent people can beat Kasparov". So we figured that a computer being able to do that task must be intelligent too. Turns out that chess greatly benefits from large memory and fast-but-simple calculations, two things computers are really, really good at and humans are not.

And it turns out that, contrary to what many people believed, chess doesn't actually require any generally intelligent code at all. In fact, a more general approach (like LLMs) actually performs much, much worse at specific tasks like chess, as exemplified by some chess program for the Atari beating one LLM after another.

Good answer, thank you!

The company I work at has an AI-related job freeze.

At the same time, AI is in the evaluation phase in the company and hardly anyone uses it for anything really. There are surveys, and they all say that AI can help a little bit in some niche circumstances, but that for most of the work it really does nothing.

Also, the AI evaluation is entirely driven by some curious employees and doesn't really have anthing to do with upper management. In fact, upper management doesn't want to pay the AI subscription fees.

I'm going to say that every layoff has a cover story. The goal, reduce the workforce make/save money, is really the only justification needed. Everything else is PR, and an attempt to stay out of legal hot water.