Just days after we reported on Google workers lambasting their internal AI tools and the company’s overall AI strategy, a new report from 404 Media has shown Amazon workers doing much the same. In internal channels, they complain about the “Kiro” Amazon coding assistant tool and AI in general, with one meme of Cillian Murphy emblazoned with the word “Sloppenheimer” being particularly emblematic of their feelings.
Like many other major tech firms, Amazon has gone all-in on AI. Though some of those efforts are customer-facing, others, like pushing staff to use a coding tool called Kiro, are internal. It turns out most workers aren’t fans.
404 Media was shown a number of popular memes from within the company that complain about how Kiro pretends to know what it’s doing, only to do the exact opposite. One example is an iceberg with Kiro saying, “Confirmed, I have the full picture,” while addressing only the surface ice.
Credit: 404 Media via anonymous Amazon staff
Other memes highlight how often the tool appears to lie, while another shows the “‘stonks’ going down” meme and says “AI usage after [performance incentives] go away.”
These memes are mostly shared in Amazon’s back-end Slack channel, #actual-aws-memes, but some workers claim that there is more mixed opinion on AI use than these memes might suggest. They say that the channel is there for people to blow off steam, so it’s not necessarily representative of how they really feel, just somewhere to vent temporarily.
Still, this report follows other ones about Google workers facing similar pushes to use AI and finding the results less than satisfying. It also comes after Amazon canceled its leaderboard AI system because so many employees were using junk prompts to inflate their usage and appear more productive. In fact, they were less productive. (If that doesn’t sound like AI in a nutshell…)
“We’re always looking to understand our teams’ experiences with various tools—that’s how we learn what works for them and what doesn’t—and while this handful of comments doesn’t reflect what we hear from most Kiro users, we still appreciate the chance to learn from the feedback,” Amazon said in a statement to 404 Media.
