Post · bonfire.cafe

@danmcquillan@kolektiva.social · 2 days ago

Anyone seen a good analysis of colleague-skills https://archive.ph/uvqBx and anti-distillation https://officechai.com/ai/chinas-workers-are-weaponizing-ai-against-each-other-through-colleague-skill-files-and-fighting-back/? Seems like a 'moral panic' that fuses legit fear of bosses replacing workers with hype about limited and hugely unreliable agentic AI.

Headline from linked article that reads:
"China’s Workers Are Weaponizing AI Against Each Other Through Colleague.Skill Files — And Fighting Back.
In Chinese tech offices, a new arms race has begun. It runs not on hardware, but on .skill files.
A GitHub project called 同事.skill (“colleague.skill”) has gone viral in China’s corporate world. The concept is simple and brutal: feed an AI model enough information about a coworker — their work logic, domain knowledge, communication style, even their daily habits — and you produce a digital replica capable of substituting for them. Once the “colleague skill” is deployed, the original employee becomes, in theory, redundant." — Headline from linked article that reads: "China’s Workers Are Weaponizing AI Against Each Other Through Colleague.Skill Files — And Fighting Back. In Chinese tech offices, a new arms race has begun. It runs not on hardware, but on .skill files. A GitHub project called 同事.skill (“colleague.skill”) has gone viral in China’s corporate world. The concept is simple and brutal: feed an AI model enough information about a coworker — their work logic, domain knowledge, communication style, even their daily habits — and you produce a digital replica capable of substituting for them. Once the “colleague skill” is deployed, the original employee becomes, in theory, redundant."

OfficeChai

China's Workers Are Weaponizing AI Against Each Other Through Colleague.Skill Files — And Fighting Back

In Chinese tech offices, a new arms race has begun. It runs not on hardware, but on .skill files. A GitHub project called...

James Tindall

@atomless@mastodon.social · 1 hour ago

@danmcquillan any marginal efficacy of so-called agent skill files that claim to threaten to replace workers has to of course be seen as entirely dependent on the way Capital has prepared the ground by making those jobs increasingly mindless and repetitive while capturing the data from that repetition

Christian Pietsch

@chpietsch@fedifreu.de · yesterday

@danmcquillan

Your second link points to this interesting analysis:

The honest truth, noted by some analysts, is that not all “AI layoffs” are really about AI — some are post-pandemic corrections dressed up in tech language because it plays better with investors. But that cynicism cuts both ways. When workers can’t tell the difference between genuine automation and strategic optics, they respond to the threat they perceive, not the one that’s technically real.
Colleague.skill and anti-distillation.skill are what that response looks like.

Once again, “AI” is used as a smokescreen – to obfuscate who is responsible for layoffs. It does not matter if “colleague.skill”s are productive if a company just wants to get rid of employees.