You could use this to train an AI to behave like a Meta-employee. Meta seems to like the behavior of Meta-employees, or it wouldn't have hired so many. It would just prefer to have more of this behavior for less, so they'll try to use clankers instead of employees to produce the key strokes and mouse clicks.

Do people honestly believe their current employers aren’t monitoring them right now?

Every employment contract I’ve signed has included language that makes it clear that whatever I do on corporate time, on the corporate net, on corporate devices, is corporate property. This is why I never mix corp and personal data on my phone or join my phone to their WiFi.

Is it just the AI training angle that makes this newsworthy?

Probably to detect all variations of dangerous words such as "union", "genocide" and "peace".