Exclusive: Departing Meta staffer posts biting anti-AI video internally amid mass layoffs

This week, Meta laid off 8,000 employees—10 percent of the company’s staff—and reassigned another 7,000 to train AI models. Fear of the layoffs had been building around the company for weeks, compounded by the way that Meta has taken a sharp turn from a company built by coders to a company that has staked its future on AI. So when a Meta software engineer named David Frenk posted a farewell parody video to the tune of “American Pie” in an internal message board, staff thought it perfectly captured how the culture of the company has fundamentally shifted. They begged him to post it to YouTube, making their plight inside the company public. 

“There’s a bit of a disconnect,” one former employee who asked not to be identified told Mother Jones, “This is a company of really smart people who work really hard—coders, engineers, designers—people whose creativity and intellect is a part of their job. And you are being told that this AI agent can do it better than you, and you are being asked to train it.”

At Meta, there’s a tradition: when you leave, you make a “badge post” on the company’s internal message board. Usually, it’s a tribute to coworkers and co-creation—very kumbaya. But Frenk turned his badge post into a crusade in C major. It became a runaway hit.

Frenk left of his own accord—his last day is today—and had a little time to decide how he wanted to go out. In an internal chat called “@shitposting” that has about 20,000 members, Frenk posted a high-production-value parody of the Don McLean song “American Pie.” You probably haven’t thought about “American Pie” in a while. The song is a lengthy ballad that unspools the history of rock and roll and laments the loss of innocence when the 1960s turned into the decade of disco. Frenk’s version recounts the recent history of Meta and its position at the edge of a tectonic shift as the company asks workers to train AI—and then lays off thousands of them. 

The song is a consummate parody, and the lyrics are laced with inside jokes and references best understood by those inside the company. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer and a 20-year veteran of the company, gets name checked multiple times for promoting an internal monitoring software called MCI, or Model Capability Initiative, that the company installed on the computers of US employees this spring. MCI tracks the way humans interact with their screens, capturing mouse clicks and keyboard strokes to train AI to appear more “human-like.” 

As Frenk sings:

And now I’m singing bye, bye, to professional prideSign the petition, no more wishing, just deny MCIIt’s the human touch that lets you know you’re aliveMaybe this can’t be replaced with AI

When the initiative was rolled out internally, the former employee said, one of the top comments on an internal message board was “how do I opt out?”

Frenk’s video currently has tens of thousands of views on Meta’s internal messaging system, though many of the comments are from accounts deactivated after Wednesday’s layoffs. The video seems to have captured a shift inside the company where profits are at a record high, executives are receiving huge raises, and yet 8,000 people have lost their jobs. (“When investors pressed us to get more lean,” Frenk asks in his parody, “Why did execs’ paychecks grow so obscene?”)

“It all feels a bit off,” the former employee said. “In a lighthearted way, even if you really, fully believe that this is the direction to go down, everything [in the video] still rings true.” (Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The comments bled over into Blind, a message board for current and former tech workers from places like Meta and Google to chat without their companies monitoring them. On Blind, people posted that the video “made me tear up” and “touched my soul.”

But the thing that really is most evilAnd the reason that morale’s in freefallIs you forgot we’re all just peopleWhen you abused AI

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