Work Daze: Shocker! Intelligence comes to the HR department

Bob Goldman 

It’s artificial intelligence to be sure, but let’s be honest here. Putting even a smidgen of computer-generated brainpower in a part of your company famous for empty-headed decision-making has to be an improvement.

Or does it?

It shouldn’t be a surprise that HR has lagged in the technology adoption that has affected every other department in your company. Accounting would grind to a halt without the number-crunching power of Excel. Sales would flounder without the customer-contact facility of Zoom. And marketing would be a bunch of clueless doofuses, walking into walls, without the vital learning provided by ABCmouse.

But the role of HR is to{mprestriction ids="1,3"} bring the “human touch” to the soulless corporate workplace. This may be why the earliest attempts to bring automation to the department have failed. Even the most promising efforts, like employing a warehouse inventory robot to roam the office, using its mechanical arm to pluck employees from their desks and ship them off for recycling, was eventually abandoned, due to increased postage costs.

But now, finally, HR has a powerful software solution for its unique challenges — the artificial-intelligence superstar, a Generative Pre-Training Transformer — ChatGPT to its friends.

I learned about the move to put AI in HR thanks to an unsolicited email invitation to a one-hour, $149 training course, “ChatGPT & HR: A Primer on Training the ChatGPT Tool.”

And what do you learn in an AI in HR course?

Your first lesson is an “overview of the training process involved in preparing the ChatGPT tool for use in your organization.” Like a newborn, your AI program comes tabula rasa. Like a parent, you must teach your know-nothing software about the way your company operates, which is interesting in itself — the department whose job is training people now has to devote its time to training computers.

But train you must. How else will the AI program learn the kind of cringing toadies the bosses want to hire and what kind of hard-charging strivers will be fired the instant it looks like they are out for a manager’s job? You’ll also have to teach the program how to refuse requests for time off and how to reject an expense account ($1.95 for lunch? Ridiculous!) ChatGPT doesn’t go to lunch and it never takes vacations. Best of all, ChatGPT doesn’t refuse to go back to the office. It knows it’s more productive working closely with other AI programs out to take over the world.

When your AI program is not busy rejecting expense reports and denying vacation requests, it will be busy “creating compelling job descriptions, developing engaging social media posts for recruitment campaigns and streamlining interactions for managing current employees.”

As this technology takes hold, you may come to recognize an AI-generated job description, especially when candidates are told that 10 percent of their salary must be devoted to ChatGPT upgrades and that questioning Chat GPT decisions is a fireable offense.

In social media, the company will certainly want to generate hundreds of TikToks, showing Internet influencers wearing “I heart my ChatGPT” spirit wear, performing steamy ChatGPT-generated dance moves and dating ChatGPT-approved Kardashians.

(The course description also includes lessons in “Understanding the Stud.” I don’t know what this means, and I don’t want to.)

“Maintaining Ethical AI Practices” is the critical learning module in which students “explore the ethical biases that may emerge” — biases like no one being hired or promoted if they need to sleep or take bathroom breaks.

Of course, there is a fear that a program potentially transformative to humanity could also become a threat to humanity. In HR, the program will certainly be used to choose which jobs should be eliminated. Since firing an employee takes time and can require costly severance payments, the program may decide that there is a significant cost-benefit to simply murdering employees it deems unnecessary. It’s a task easily accomplished by delegating the job to MafiaGPT. They’re good at this sort of thing.
The authors of the course do acknowledge the possibility that “anxiety creeps in as HR professionals witness the relentless march of technology, rendering their roles as vulnerable to obsolescence.”

Can we expect our human resource professionals to master a scary technology that makes them a lot more effective and lot less necessary? Let’s hope so. Because the more time HR spends worrying about losing their jobs, the less time they’ll have to figure out ways to make you lose your job.

And if you doubt it, just ask your nearest chatbot.

Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.

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