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Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Companys workplace advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer your biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: What should I do if my coworker is using AI unethically?A: This is a question that feels new but is actually just an evolution of a classic workplace issue. You can slot any number of issues in the place of AI and the problem is essentially the same: Whats the best way to handle misconduct at work?The answer for all situations, including this one, comes down to a few factors:1. Do you know (or just suspect) your coworker is doing something they shouldnt?2. Does the misconduct violate company policy or is it something you just dont agree with? 3. How severe is the misconduct? And is it a pattern or a one-off?4. What is your relationship with the coworker? Lets take this scenario through those checkpoints. Are they actually doing something wrong? The use of AI at work can be a contentious topic. Your first step should be to check your companys AI policy and make sure that the way you suspect your colleague to be using AI is actually in violation of the policy.Typically companies have varying degrees of comfort around using AI for workflow and administrative tasks, including email, scheduling, and note-taking. If your company is okay with AI use for these purposes, there might also be a clause that the use of AI tools needs to be disclosed (for example: letting meeting participants know that you are using an AI notetaker).Companies should also have guidance on using AI to complete the work itself (like in written reports or presentations, creating images, etc.). Again, at the very least, the policy should ask that employees credit and acknowledge work that was created by or with the help of AI.If your company doesnt have an AI policy or its too vague, your first stop should be with company leadership to suggest the need for clearer guidelines. While your coworker should have basic ethics and know better than to submit work thats false or fabricated or pass off AI work as their own, they cant be blamed for violating a policy that doesnt exist. How severe is it? Assuming the AI use is in violation of company policy, there are a couple of approaches depending on how severe it is and your relationship with your coworker. Using AI to help write email responses is a lot different than passing off work that you didnt create or outsourcing quotes and data to AI without fact-checking. If its a workflow process that you dont agree with but that comes down to a personal preference, you can either bring it up directly with your coworker or go to their manager. As long as you feel comfortable and have a good relationship, going directly to the person should be your first step. Assume good intentions. Say something like I noticed you are using AI notetakers for our weekly staff meeting. I think thats against our AI policy because of privacy concerns. You might want to check with John about it and see if we can have an intern take notes instead.If you suspect someone is passing off AI work as their own, or submitting work with AI-produced errors, its more of a delicate situation. If you arent the persons boss, its not for you to litigate, but before you make a potentially career-damaging accusation, do a little fact-checking. If you have proof that the work is in violation of company policy, take it to their manager, express your concerns, and let them take it from there. If you are in a leadership position and you are sure that an employees work is unethical or contains false information, confront the employee with proof. The degree of the deception should dictate whether the employee can be trusted again after a warning or if its a fireable offense. More on AI at work: Nearly half of workers using AI at work admit to doing so inappropriately How to learn to work with your new AI coworker Bots, agents, and digital workers: AI is changing the very definition of work
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Follow your dreams.Its the first piece of advice most of us are ever given: as kids in the classroom, as students on campus, as graduates preparing to enter the workforce, and as working adults. We are told that jobs are for pursuing passions, not just paychecks. If we do what we love, money and success will follow. If we love what we do, well never work a day in our lives. And the corollary to all that dreaminess? If we dont find employment doing whatever we find most fulfilling, were somehow failures. We dont have to follow our dreams to end up with our dream jobs. In fact, Id argue the opposite. When it comes to careers, follow your dreams can be nightmare advice. Thats because most of us enter the working world without knowing what those dreams are.Instead, Id suggest its better to follow your opportunities. A culture of dreams We might think we know what our dreams are. We might even feel certain of them. After all, Americans are spoon-fed a diet high in dreams. Theyre the cornerstone of our cultural canon, the basis of fairy tales, superhero stories, and countless Disney and DreamWorks movies. And they arent just relegated to fiction and fantasy. Phrases like Im living the dream, Its a dream come true, The man (or woman) of my dreams, and Beyond my wildest dreams are part of our lexicon. Athletes say these words in post-game interviews after winning big and making it to the finals. Actors repeat them in acceptance speeches as they clutch a shiny statuette. Even contestants on dating shows utter them after receiving a rose and surviving for another week. From our youngest years, we are asked about our career dreams: What do you want to be when you grow up? Obviously, we have no experience at being anything other than a kid. So why not aspire to be a pro athlete or a pop star? A grab bag of options As we get older and prepare to enter the workplace, some of us still hold on to our childhood or teenage dreams, or we find new ones. Certainly, we are more mature and thoughtful at age twenty-two than we were at age five or fifteen. The sources influencing us are likely to be more logical: our favorite course in college, the recruiter we talked to at an on-campus career fair, or a summer internship that stimulated us intellectually or socially. But like our younger selves, were still picking from a grab bag of options largely chosen for us by others or offered from limited experiences. Even if we have a better understanding of what work is, our understanding of who we are is still limited. Consequently, most of us dont have a clear idea of what we truly want to be when we grow upespecially not at the start of our careers. And thats a cause for celebration! The point of living is to learn as we go (and grow). That should be the point of working, too: to try new things, to meet different people, to understand ourselves betterwhat we like and what we cant stand, what excites us and what bores us, what fills us with joy on a Monday morning and what fills us with dread on a Sunday night. We spend a third of our lives on the job. It just makes sense that whatever we fantasized about doing while dozing off in Econ 101 probably isnt what well want to be doing thirty years later. But instead of understanding how lucky this makes us, how much freedom we have, all too often we just feel lost. Because weve been taught to find direction in our dreamsthat they should be like a North Star to guide us. We may feel envious of people who seem to have a fixed dream to follow to help them on their way. Missed opportunities Heres the thing: Professional dreams can be incredibly limiting. When we enter the workplace convinced that we already know what we want to doand are committed to doing it at all costswhat were saying, in essence, is that theres nothing left for us to learn or be curious about, nothing that could change our minds, nothing else that would make us happier or more fulfilled. Were saying that even though our careers are only just beginning, we already know what we want out of them. With that mindset, we risk sleepwalking through life and hitting snooze on a host of bigger, better opportunities that come our way, opportunities that we never could have dreamed up. Just like we cant be what we cant see, we cant dream what we dont know. So, at any one time, our wants and wishes for the future have a near-infinite number of blind spots. They include every industry we havent yet worked in, every company we havent yet encountered, and every job we havent tried doing ourselves. Unfamiliar territory The world of I dont know is big and always getting bigger. New industries emerge all the time. New companies launch every day. The newer they are, the less likely we are to know about them. Even if we do, the more entrenched we are in our dreams, the less likely we are to want to step foot on unfamiliar territory. Instead, we live in the comfort of a decision we made years ago. But what feels like a seatbelt keeping us secure can also be a trap confining us. Those of us who arent committed to a specific dream, on the other hand, have the opportunity to follow new opportunities. Where the dreamers close themselves off, the non-dreamers stay open. Our culture likes to think of themof usas lost, but the best way to make ones way has always been to stay alert and be willing to turn left, right, or back to try a new route when necessary. We cant do that when our eyes are closed and we are dreaming about something else. Possessing dreams versus allowing them to possess us Does that mean we should discard dreams wholesale? Of course not. Theres nothing wrong with having them and holding on to them, even when they seem unlikely, and the odds are stacked against them coming true. Dreams can motivate us, guide us, and serve as reminders of whats most important to us. And achieving them feels great in a way thats hard to top. But theres a difference between possessing dreams and allowing dreams to possess us. Theres a difference between keeping a dream alive while remaining open to other opportunities and closing ourselves off to everything other than our capital-D dream. All of usand all our careerswould be better off if we did way more of the former and way less of the latter. Lifes most exciting and least expected adventures are found when we refuse to be restricted and restrained by what weve previously imagined. Maybe the random opportunity we say yes to gets us nowhere. Or maybe were great at it. Maybe it makes us truly happy. Maybe it ends up exceeding our wildest dreams. Maybe it becomes our wildest dream. Only now, unlike our childhood fantasies, well be equipped with a real understanding of what it entails, what it requires of us, and whether were up for itwhich makes it a whole lot more likely to become our reality and, quite literally, a dream come true.Excerpted with permission from 15 Lies Women Are Told at Work
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After years of AI disrupting industries and streamlining repetitive workflows, the technology is now poised to transform animation. In 2024, director and writer Tom Patons AiMation Studios released Where the Robots Grow, a fully AI-animated feature film. Everything from animation and voice acting to music was generated using AI, at a cost of just $8,000 per minutetotaling around $700,000 for the 87-minute production. While IMDB reviewers criticized the film as soulless and uninspired, it proved that AI can deliver full-length animated features at a fraction of traditional budgets. But its not just filmmakers driving this shift. Indie game developers want to prototype characters and worlds in hours, not weeks. TikTok and social media creators are looking to animate original characters without studio resources. Major brands, too, seek emotionally resonant storytelling without monthslong timelines or ballooning 3D animation costs.The challenge: most 3D animation tools are still slow, technical, and expensive. Hoping to remove these barriers, a team of developers from OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and Riot Games launched Cartwheel, an AI-powered 3D animation platform.Cartwheel promises to make high-quality 3D character animation 100 times faster, simpler, and more affordable. Users can record motion with a smartphone, describe a scene with a text prompt, or pull from a library of expressive 3D movements. The platforms AI transforms input into production-ready animations. Artists can refine them in Cartwheel or export into tools like Unity, Unreal Engine, Maya, or Blenderwithout disrupting their pipeline.The startup was cofounded by Andrew Carr, a former OpenAI scientist who helped develop Codex and ChatGPTs code generation, and Jonathan Jarvis, former creative director at Google Creative Lab and founder of the animation studio Universal Patterns.The two met after OpenAI, intrigued by Jarviss concept for a generative animation tool, introduced him to Carr, who had just left the company to explore how AI could make animation more accessible.I had a unique job, where I used animation to share complex research concepts clearly within Google, and make prototypes that couldnt yet be built by software. Andrew always wanted to animate, and later invented a way to talk to Blender, a popular open-source 3D software, with computer code, says Jarvis. We always wanted to build tools to help others get ideas moving and sensed the potential to animate in new ways using gen AI, that it would be centered around creative control.After two years in stealth, Cartwheel is gaining traction. The company recently closed a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, with support from WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg), Khosla Ventures, Accel, Runway, and Tirta Ventures (Ben Feder), bringing total funding to $15.6 million.Over 60,000 animators, developers, and storytellers joined Cartwheels wait-list during stealth. Early adopters from DreamWorks, Duolingo, and Roblox are already using the platform.All of our AI models are developed in-house. Behind the scenes, weve employed careful software engineering to ensure that all the pieces of our system work together in a way that can be plugged into existing animation pipelines, Carr says. Ensuring that the generated animation is properly scaled, moves naturally, and remains consistent throughout has been one of our biggest challenges.[Image: Cartwheel]A Creator-First AI Animation ToolWhile the generative AI field is increasingly crowded, Cartwheel positions itself differently: not as a replacement for artists, but as a tool that amplifies their creativity.Animators and creatives dont care if motion is generated, done by hand, motion-captured, or drawn from a library. They just want it to move to tell their story, make their game, or get their job done, Jarvis says. Our motion models can generate a lot of useful animation quickly, but they cant do everything. Thats why we love a hybrid approach. Computers are great at finding patterns, but its the artist who brings the soul.A key differentiator for Cartwheel is its team. Carr and Jarvis are joined by industry veterans with experience in film, games, and interactive design. Catherine Cat Hicks, former Pixar animation director on Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story 3, serves as head of Animation Innovation. Neil Helm, head of Interactive Animation, worked on crowd systems at Pixar for Turning Red, Lightyear, Up, and Inside Out 2.The platforms design is shaped by Steven Ziadie, former Sony and Riot designer, while production is led by Buthaina Mahmud, who helped define Unitys real-time animation workflows and developed shaders used in the Spider-Verse films.We reached out, and some reached out to us. Over time, we realized we all shared the goal to make storytelling faster, easier, and more powerful, Carr and Jarvis tell Fast Company. Culture is being shaped in increasingly dynamic, interactive, and immersive spaces like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Robloxall animation-driven experiences. Were building tools for where animation is headed, and thats resonating with industry veterans.User feedback has helped shape Cartwheels interface.We began with a focus on text to animation. In beta, we learned that while thats compelling in many situations, often folks want to browse motions for inspiration, use video reference, or act out the motion themselvesso weve moved to a multimodal interface, Carr says.Whats Next for Cartwheel?High-quality animation data remains scarce, with most data sets proprietary or lacking in diversity and detail. To address this, Cartwheel is using synthetic dataAI-generated animations that mimic real-world motionto train and refine its models.The next generation of AI companies has to find and curate the hard data types, and do the hard work to refine it and make it useful to people in that field. Thats where the value is, Carr says. While at OpenAI, I worked on the science of data quality and was able to generate millions of dollars of model improvements with just a few lines of code. We are following the same path at Cartwheel to ensure we produce he styles, qualities, and delightfulness in our motion data that artists need.With fresh funding, Cartwheel plans to deepen R&D, grow its team, and bring its platform to broader markets.Over the next 12 months, we aim to be a catalyst, enabling both large and small animation projects to flourish, Jarvis says. Ensuring ethically sourced data that empowers artists is fundamental to our approach. We are a team of artists building tools for artists.
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