In front of political and tech leaders gathered at a summit in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron called for a strategy on Monday to make up for the delay in France and Europe in investing in artificial intelligence (AI) but was faced with a "counter-summit" that pointed out the risks of the technology.
The use of chatbots at work and school is destroying jobs, professions and threatening the acquisition of knowledge, said union representatives gathered at the Theatre de la Concorde located in the Champs-Elysees gardens, less than a kilometer from the venue of the Summit for Action on Artificial Intelligence.
Habib El Kettani, from Solidaires Informatique, a union representing IT workers, described an "automation already underway for about ten years," which has been reinforced with the arrival of the flagship tool ChatGPT at the end of 2022.
"I have been fighting for ten years to ensure that my job does not become an endangered species," said Sandrine Larizza, from the CGT union at France Travail, a public service dedicated to the unemployed.
She deplored "a disappearance of social rights that goes hand in hand with the automation of public services," where the development of AI has served, according to her "to make people work faster to respond less and less to the needs of users, by reducing staff numbers."
Loss of meaning
"With generative AI, it is no longer the agent who responds by email to the unemployed person but the generative AI that gives the answers with a multitude of discounted job offers in subcontracting," said Larizza.
This is accompanied by "a destruction of our human capacities to play a social role, a division into micro-tasks on the assembly line and an industrialization of our professions with a loss of meaning," she said, a few days after the announcement of a partnership between France Travail and the French startup Mistral.
"Around 40 projects" are also being tested "with postal workers," said Marie Vairon, general secretary of the Sud PTT union of the La Poste and La Banque Postale group.
AI is used "to manage schedules and simplify tasks with a tool tested since 2020 and generalized since 2023," she said, noting that the results are "not conclusive."
After the implementation at the postal bank, La Banque Postale, of "Lucy," a conversational robot handling some "300,000 calls every month," Vairon is concerned about a "generative AI serving as a coach for bank advisers."
‘Students are using it’
On the education side, "whether we like it or not, students are using it," said Stephanie de Vanssay, national educational and digital adviser of the National Union of Autonomous Unions (UNSA) for primary and secondary school.
"We have indifferent teachers, worried teachers who are afraid of losing control and quality of learning, skeptics, and those who are angry about all the other priorities," she said.
Developing the critical thinking of some 12 million students is becoming, in any case, "an even more serious concern and it is urgent to explain how to use these tools and why," de Vanssay said.
The Minister of National Education Elisabeth Borne announced on Thursday the launch of a call for tenders for an AI for teachers, as well as a charter of use and training for teachers.
"No critical thinking without interactions and without helping each other to think and progress in one's thinking, which requires intermediation," said Beatrice Laurent, national secretary of UNSA education. "A baby with a tablet and nursery rhymes will not learn to speak."
