Co-op Legal Services and the fully automated employee panopticon

An article in the Guardian describes how Co-op Legal Services are using a system produced by OpenAI to implement a quantified panopticon for their staff. In a system described as “oppressive and dystopian” by a whistleblower, Co-op Legal Services is using AI models to record, analyse and award a percentage score for interactions between agents and customers seeking advice about probate, wills and estates. A model from OpenAI has been trained to assess more than 50 discrete aspects of each phone call and provide pass and fail scores to managers who use the data to analyse employee performance. One worker said the system can mean their work is monitored by AI for several hours a day as they handle inquiries often from recently bereaved customers. I am a member of the Co-op and I don’t like the sound of this at all, so I wrote to them at their complaints email address. Here’s my email. I am a Co-op member (number [REDACTED]) but after having read about the AI panopticon that you are…