First up: the immediate reply thread:
Summary: Hey guys, this was hypothetical, we would never do this really!
Summary: Again, we would never do this, it's super unethical and we agree with your concerns. We just made it a big part of our presentation for some reason.
Summary: Okay, actually we have used these methods, just on someone who had already left the company.
And lastly, not a tweet but from the presentation itself, via PC Gamer:
Nichiporchik said combining AI with conventional HR tools might enable game studios to "identify someone who is on the verge of burning out, who might be the reason the colleagues who work with that person are burning out," and then fix the issue before it becomes a real problem. He acknowledged the dystopian edge to the whole thing, calling it "very Black Mirror level of stuff," but added, "it works," and suggested that the studio had already put the system to use to discover a studio lead who "was not in a good place."
"Had we waited for a month, we would probably not have a studio," Nichiporchik said. "So I’m really happy that that worked."
Summary: Yeah, we have actually used these tools and methods and will continue to do so.
Hey, I think I know of someone at tinyBuild who might be contributing to burnout among their colleagues! You planning on removing them?
It also shouldn't be left unsaid: what he's suggesting is not just evil, it's stupid. Counting how many times someone says "I" or "me" in slack has nothing to do with burnout, and even if it did you don't need to use ChatGPT. ChatGPT can't reliably do simple fucking math because that isn't what it was meant to do.
The reason that "AI" is being used instead of "a simple function used to count these words" is because "AI" implies that some sort of higher thinking is behind the decision making. It's an attempt to pass the buck to a computer so it's not the responsibility of management. "Oh, sorry, we aren't saying you're a toxic worker, the machine we built to detect toxic workers is saying that." Forgeting that they designed the machine and the machine can't reliably tell you how many times the letter "n" shows up in the word "mayonnaise."