Artificial Intelligence
AI Downsides: Indeed & Glassdoor’s 1,300 Layoffs, McDonald’s Data Leak & More
Updated on Fri, Jul 11, 2025
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has been at the center of development over the past few years, almost dictating how companies innovate and create new products.
Quite often, this dictation helps them enhance their operations, boost productivity, reduce costs, and improve overall efficiency—but sometimes the dictation comes with downsides.
Recently, satellite navigation and location technology company TomTom said it was laying off 300 workers in favor of AI.
Soon after, Recruit Holdings—the parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor—announced plans to reduce its workforce by around 1,300 people or about 6% across the two job sites, as it moves to AI technology. These cuts will largely affect U.S. workers, hitting the research and development, growth, and people and sustainability teams.
Although the company didn’t provide an explicit reason for the layoffs, its CEO, Hisayuki "Deko" Idekoba, said, “AI is changing the world, and we must adapt by ensuring our product delivers truly great experiences for job seekers and employers.”
This adds to the previously reported news of Microsoft revealing plans to cut 4% of its workforce, or around 9,000 jobs, as it opts to leverage AI technology and make up for the heavy AI investments it previously incurred. This added to the 6,000 employees it had dropped earlier in May, taking the total to 15,000 workers.
The move hit its gaming studios pretty hard, and included games being cancelled, studios getting closed, services shut down, and more woes.
Amid this, Matt Turnbull, Executive Producer at Xbox Game Studios Publishing, offered those affected by the layoffs some tone-deaf advice.
In a now-deleted post, Turnbull suggested that the employees who are losing their jobs due to AI should use AI to feel better and move on. Our statement might sound harsher than it was meant to be, but that’s pretty much on the same theme as Turnbull's advice—perhaps it might differ from person to person.
Have a read and let us know what you think. As per reports, here’s what the post said:
“These are really challenging times, and if you're navigating a layoff or even quietly preparing for one, you're not alone and you don't have to go it alone.”
“I know these types of tools engender strong feelings in people, but I'd be remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances. I've been experimenting with ways to use LLM Al tools (like ChatGPT or Copilot) to help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss.”
Turnbull then provided some prompt ideas and use cases for readers, which covered “Career Planning Prompts,” “Resume & LinkedIn Help,” “Networking & Outreach,” and “Emotional Clarity & Confidence.”
Prompts ranged from “Act as a career coach. I've been laid off from a [role] in the game industry. Help me build a 30-day plan to regroup, research new roles, and start applying without burning out,” to “Write a warm intro message for reaching out to someone at [studio name] about a job posting,” and “I'm struggling with imposter syndrome after being laid off. Can you help me reframe this experience in a way that reminds me what I'm good at?”
“Stay kind, stay smart, stay connected,” is how the post concluded.
On the flip side, AI is also causing problems for Microsoft.
Researchers from Outflank were able to develop an AI-powered malware LLM (large language model) that can beat Windows Defender around 8% of the time. In comparison, Anthropic’s AI model could do it just 1% and DeepSeek could do so 0.5% of the time.
The “highly skilled red team composed of experienced professionals” spent three months and around $1,500 training the open-source Qwen 2.5 model to make it capable of bypassing Microsoft’s security tool.
However, the group is of the good kind and specializes in assessing resilience against advanced threats and training security teams for enhanced incident response, according to its website. Their plan is to debut the new AI malware at Black Hat 2025 in August.
Phew! Microsoft isn’t under attack—yet.
Trouble due to AI models isn’t a new concept and was foreseen by many experts. Although in those cases, the part to worry about came courtesy of cybercriminals. However, AI models trained for certain jobs are also now playing their part.
As per a report, McDonald’s AI chatbot Olivia, which screens applicants who want to join the company, hit a security snag. This also included the work of security researchers—Ian Carroll and Sam Curry—who found a simple way to hack into the AI chatbot's backend on McHire.com.
It didn’t even take sophisticated skills or powerful tools, just simple guesswork—they guessed an administrator account's username and password, which was “123456.” This gave them access to the data of 64 million records, such as applicants' names, email addresses, and phone numbers.
“I started applying for a job, and then after 30 minutes, we had full access to virtually every application that's ever been made to McDonald's going back years,” said Carroll.
McDonald’s blames Paradox.ai, the company that built the AI chatbot, saying, “We’re disappointed by this unacceptable vulnerability from a third-party provider, Paradox.ai. As soon as we learned of the issue, we mandated Paradox.ai to remediate the issue immediately, and it was resolved on the same day it was reported to us.”
Paradox.ai owned up to its error and said it does not “take this matter lightly, even though it was resolved swiftly and effectively.”
In more bleak AI news, the U.S. government is investigating a bad actor who used AI to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s voice and contacted three foreign ministers using the Signal messaging app, using the display name marco.rubio@state.gov.
As per a State Department cable, the imposter contacted at least five individuals, including a U.S. governor and a member of Congress, in addition to the three foreign ministers. “The actor left voicemails on Signal for at least two targeted individuals, and in one instance, sent a text message inviting the individual to communicate on Signal,” the cable stated.
However, the individuals who were contacted remained unidentified, along with what was said in voicemails.
Do you think AI technology is opening a can of worms that may not be able to be controlled in the future? Do you think AI companies need to assess all potential threats before deploying such technology?
Let us know in the comments below!
Quite often, this dictation helps them enhance their operations, boost productivity, reduce costs, and improve overall efficiency—but sometimes the dictation comes with downsides.
Recently, satellite navigation and location technology company TomTom said it was laying off 300 workers in favor of AI.
Soon after, Recruit Holdings—the parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor—announced plans to reduce its workforce by around 1,300 people or about 6% across the two job sites, as it moves to AI technology. These cuts will largely affect U.S. workers, hitting the research and development, growth, and people and sustainability teams.
Although the company didn’t provide an explicit reason for the layoffs, its CEO, Hisayuki "Deko" Idekoba, said, “AI is changing the world, and we must adapt by ensuring our product delivers truly great experiences for job seekers and employers.”
This adds to the previously reported news of Microsoft revealing plans to cut 4% of its workforce, or around 9,000 jobs, as it opts to leverage AI technology and make up for the heavy AI investments it previously incurred. This added to the 6,000 employees it had dropped earlier in May, taking the total to 15,000 workers.
The move hit its gaming studios pretty hard, and included games being cancelled, studios getting closed, services shut down, and more woes.
Amid this, Matt Turnbull, Executive Producer at Xbox Game Studios Publishing, offered those affected by the layoffs some tone-deaf advice.
In a now-deleted post, Turnbull suggested that the employees who are losing their jobs due to AI should use AI to feel better and move on. Our statement might sound harsher than it was meant to be, but that’s pretty much on the same theme as Turnbull's advice—perhaps it might differ from person to person.
Have a read and let us know what you think. As per reports, here’s what the post said:
“These are really challenging times, and if you're navigating a layoff or even quietly preparing for one, you're not alone and you don't have to go it alone.”
“I know these types of tools engender strong feelings in people, but I'd be remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances. I've been experimenting with ways to use LLM Al tools (like ChatGPT or Copilot) to help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss.”
Turnbull then provided some prompt ideas and use cases for readers, which covered “Career Planning Prompts,” “Resume & LinkedIn Help,” “Networking & Outreach,” and “Emotional Clarity & Confidence.”
Prompts ranged from “Act as a career coach. I've been laid off from a [role] in the game industry. Help me build a 30-day plan to regroup, research new roles, and start applying without burning out,” to “Write a warm intro message for reaching out to someone at [studio name] about a job posting,” and “I'm struggling with imposter syndrome after being laid off. Can you help me reframe this experience in a way that reminds me what I'm good at?”
“Stay kind, stay smart, stay connected,” is how the post concluded.
On the flip side, AI is also causing problems for Microsoft.
Researchers from Outflank were able to develop an AI-powered malware LLM (large language model) that can beat Windows Defender around 8% of the time. In comparison, Anthropic’s AI model could do it just 1% and DeepSeek could do so 0.5% of the time.
The “highly skilled red team composed of experienced professionals” spent three months and around $1,500 training the open-source Qwen 2.5 model to make it capable of bypassing Microsoft’s security tool.
However, the group is of the good kind and specializes in assessing resilience against advanced threats and training security teams for enhanced incident response, according to its website. Their plan is to debut the new AI malware at Black Hat 2025 in August.
Phew! Microsoft isn’t under attack—yet.
Trouble due to AI models isn’t a new concept and was foreseen by many experts. Although in those cases, the part to worry about came courtesy of cybercriminals. However, AI models trained for certain jobs are also now playing their part.
As per a report, McDonald’s AI chatbot Olivia, which screens applicants who want to join the company, hit a security snag. This also included the work of security researchers—Ian Carroll and Sam Curry—who found a simple way to hack into the AI chatbot's backend on McHire.com.
It didn’t even take sophisticated skills or powerful tools, just simple guesswork—they guessed an administrator account's username and password, which was “123456.” This gave them access to the data of 64 million records, such as applicants' names, email addresses, and phone numbers.
“I started applying for a job, and then after 30 minutes, we had full access to virtually every application that's ever been made to McDonald's going back years,” said Carroll.
McDonald’s blames Paradox.ai, the company that built the AI chatbot, saying, “We’re disappointed by this unacceptable vulnerability from a third-party provider, Paradox.ai. As soon as we learned of the issue, we mandated Paradox.ai to remediate the issue immediately, and it was resolved on the same day it was reported to us.”
Paradox.ai owned up to its error and said it does not “take this matter lightly, even though it was resolved swiftly and effectively.”
In more bleak AI news, the U.S. government is investigating a bad actor who used AI to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s voice and contacted three foreign ministers using the Signal messaging app, using the display name marco.rubio@state.gov.
As per a State Department cable, the imposter contacted at least five individuals, including a U.S. governor and a member of Congress, in addition to the three foreign ministers. “The actor left voicemails on Signal for at least two targeted individuals, and in one instance, sent a text message inviting the individual to communicate on Signal,” the cable stated.
However, the individuals who were contacted remained unidentified, along with what was said in voicemails.
Do you think AI technology is opening a can of worms that may not be able to be controlled in the future? Do you think AI companies need to assess all potential threats before deploying such technology?
Let us know in the comments below!
First published on Fri, Jul 11, 2025
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