Your first draft now has a log

The useful part

Workplace surveillance has reached the one place it couldn't: the thought before the thought. It helps an employee make sense of a hard situation at work, prepare for a conversation with a manager, figure out whether what happened was serious or not. Someone walks out of a bad meeting, opens the tool the company installed, and types the sentence they would never put in an email.

How it works

• From the contract's point of view the answer is simple: the data belongs to whoever bought the access.
• A 2024 study with the fitting title Trust No Bot went through real conversations between people and language models and found health, money, relationships and work surfacing in places nobody expected them,...
• The company where that person works is the one paying for it.
• From the point of view of the person who typed it, the answer is also simple, and it is the opposite one.
• Every job carries friction and discomfort that cannot be designed away, and a tool that helps someone get through that without becoming a file or a complaint struck me as one of the most useful things AI...

What to take from it

What I had not seen is that this product gets sold inside a market that has already decided what an employee's confession is worth, and the answer is: not much.

Details worth keeping

Cover image: generated by the author with AI. The whole product lives in the distance between those two answers.