This AI Bot Fills Out Job Applications for You While You Sleep | The fight over return-to-office is getting dirty | Bob Iger's return as Disney's CEO once sparked hope inside the company. Now, insiders are anxious and losing faith. | Hollywood Actors Strike Ends With a Deal That Will Impact AI and Streaming for Decades

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � This AI Bot Fills Out Job Applications for You While You Sleep - WIRED    In July, software engineer Julian Joseph became the latest victim of the tech industry’s sweeping job cuts. Facing his second layoff in two years, he dreaded spending another couple months hunched over his laptop filling out repetitive job applications and blasting them into the void. Joseph specializes in user interface automation and figured someone must have roboticized the unpleasant task of applying for jobs. Casting about online, he came upon a company called LazyApply. It offers an AI-powered service called Job GPT that promises to automatically apply to thousands of jobs “in a single click.” All he had to fill in was some basic information about his skills, experience, and desired position. After Joseph paid $250 for a lifetime unlimited plan and installed LazyApply’s Chrome extension, he watched the bot zip through applications on his behalf on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed, targeting jobs that matched his criteria. Thirsting for efficiency, he installed the app on his boyfriend’s laptop too, and he went to bed with two computers furiously churning through reams of applications. By morning, the bot had applied to close to 1,000 jobs on his behalf. Continued here The fight over return-to-office is getting dirty - Business Insider    Amazon has built its $1.3 trillion empire largely by tracking and evaluating almost every aspect of a customer's life. From a new TV to a toilet-paper refill, Amazon knows what a customer wants and when they want it, and it's always ready to serve it to them. This obsession with metrics and data, however, does not appear to extend to certain parts of Amazon's workplace. Over the past few months, the company has aggressively pushed employees back to the office. In February, Amazon announced that employees would be required to come into the office three days a week and since then, the e-commerce giant has escalated its battle with remote employees: sending emails to employees about their attendance, creating internal dashboards to display how many days a week each employee was coming into the office, and telling managers in October that they could begin firing employees who weren't meeting the return-to-office requirements. When perturbed employees have pressed executives for the reason behind the mandate, supposedly data-obsessed higher-ups have seemed to have no data to justify it. Asked in August about this, Mike Hopkins, a senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, offered a vague response, saying that he had "no data either way" on whether mandating in-office work made people more productive but that executives believe Amazon's workers do their best work when they're together. Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Bob Iger's return as Disney's CEO once sparked hope inside the company. Now, insiders are anxious and losing faith. - Business Insider    At a celebration for the Walt Disney Co.'s 100th anniversary on October 16, staffers gathered on the famed Burbank lot to snack on tacos, pose for photos with Goofy and other costumed characters, and take in a screening of a short film, "Once Upon a Studio," featuring Disney characters from over the decades. What should have been a moment of celebratory triumph for the entertainment giant was overshadowed by low staff morale and questions about what's next. Just a week earlier, the company had seen its lowest stock price in more than nine years, after laying off 7,000 people in the spring and seeking to cut $5.5 billion in costs. And CEO Bob Iger, who led the company to eye-popping growth during his first 15-year tenure as chief, was nearly a year into his second stint in the role and facing increasingly tough questions about how to stabilize Disney. Continued here Hollywood Actors Strike Ends With a Deal That Will Impact AI and Streaming for Decades - WIRED    After 118 days on the picket lines, the longest such strike in Hollywood’s history, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Both sides were mum about the terms of the deal Wednesday night, but it comes following a long struggle over the use of artificial intelligence on actors’ performances and actors’ demands for residual payments for shows and films that play on streaming services. A committee from SAG, which represents thousands of film and television actors, approved the agreement Wednesday. The strike itself, which has featured pickets outside the offices of Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and others, will end Thursday morning. It’s expected that the tentative deal will head to the union’s national board to be approved on Friday. Undeniably, this is a huge milestone for Hollywood, a $130 billion-plus industry that has all but ground to halt this year, as both the Writers Guild of America and SAG dug in their heels over fair wages and the use of AI in their work. WGA members went on strike in May; SAG walked off the job in July, the first time the industry had faced a dual work stoppage since 1960. The WGA strike ended in September with a historic deal that put up guardrails to protect writers from AI encroaching on their work. Continued here

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