The introduction of new tools has always had an impact on the economy and ultimately on society, changing the relations of production, the work settings and peer interaction, often determining new routines, new lifestyles, new ways of living. According to [1, 2] the deployment of artificial intelligent systems (either embodied or non-embodied), in the 21st century, has introduced a fundamental twofold ontological shift with deep anthropological consequences: (i) tools have lost their inherent purely instrumental status and have suddenly become potentially autonomous entities capable of agency, (ii) environments, on the other hand, have acquired a hybrid nature, where the analogic and the digital merge and where the physical and the virtual converge, where natural intelligence and autonomous artificial systems cohabit in a fusion that blurs the lines between the physical, the digital and the biological. That ontological shift brings about the most profound change in the paradigm defined by the typical human relationship with tools favoring, in contexts that are exclusively profit-driven, the emergence of work conditions that are highly disrespectful of human dignity. The present paper addresses the misuse of AI technology at the workplace from a particular case study, highlighting how deeply this misuse can affect human beings’ well-being and dignity and calling for the urge of a widespread assessment of algorithm design and its deployment within a human rights framework.