As the workforces around the world embrace chatbots and artificial intelligence, there are growing concerns that the much talked about ChatGPT will take over.
This AI tool, since its release in November 2022, has been used to create a children's book, write cover letters and help students cheat on their essays. It can produce increasingly sophisticated written content, including legal documents and even author legislation.
The much-hyped ChatGPT can write computer code to program applications and software, check human coders' language for errors and transform ideas from plain English into programming language.
Moreover, employees at Amazon who tested the AI tool said it does a very good job at answering customer support questions, is great at making training documents, and is very strong at answering queries.
Potentially Replace Jobs
Anu Madgavkar, a partner at McKinsey Global Institute, believes AI and its tools need to be seen as productivity enhancing tools. She expects AI will become affordable and more advanced in the future, and potentially disrupt white-collar work, according to Yahoo Finance.
ChatGPT can replace these jobs in the near future:
i. Programming, Software Engineers – this is need of the hour and highly sought-after jobs. But tech jobs like web developers, computer programmers, data scientists and coders can be replaced by AI technologies. Madgavkar said ChatGPT can produce faster coding with relative accuracy than humans.
ii. Media – AI tools can disrupt jobs in content creation. The expert highlighted that ChatGPT is able to read, write and understand text-based data. She explained that analyzing and interpreting vast amounts of language based data and information is a skill that one would expect AI technologies to ramp up on. As such, journalism, creative writing and technical writing jobs would be replaced. It should be noted that CNET, a tech news platform, used an AI tool like ChatGPT to write dozens of articles and BuzzFeed is set to use tech from the ChatGPT maker to generate new forms of content.
iii. Legal Industry – paralegals, legal assistants, and language-oriented roles are susceptible to automation. Madgavkar said data is quite structured, very language-oriented, and quite amendable to generative AI. But AI won't be able to fully automate these jobs as it requires a degree of human judgment to understand what the client wants. "It's like a bit of productivity boost that some of these occupations might get, because you can use tools that actually do it better," Madgavkar said.
iv. Market Research Analysts – a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Mark Muro believes market research jobs would be taken over by AI tools because artificial intelligence is good at analyzing data and predicting outcomes. Market research analysts collect data, identify trends within the data and use the results to create effective marketing campaigns. Muro said this can be handled well by AI.
v. Finance Jobs – these are mainly to do with number crunching. Jobs, such as financial analyst, and personal financial advisor that require manipulating significant amounts of numerical data can be affected by AI. Muro pointed out that AI can identify trends in the market, highlight what investments in a portfolio are doing better and worse, use various other forms of data and forecast a better investment mix.
vi. Traders – Wall Street jobs can be replaced by AI as its all about data, figures and forecasts. This can be better done by AI than humans who are hired right out of college and take huge amounts of salary.
vii. Teachers – After students used ChatGPT to cheat on their homework, Pengcheng Shi from Rochester Institute of Technology, believes teachers should worry about their jobs. He said ChatGPT can easily teach classes and it can be trained to do so, that is, after the tool has been improved – bugs and inaccuracies gotten rid off
viii. Graphic Designers – AI is already being used to create and generate images. One good example is DALL-E. An article in Harvard Business Review stated that upskilling millions of people in their ability to create and manipulate images will have profound impact on the economy. "Recent advances in AI will usher in a period of hardship and economic pain for those whose jobs are directly impacted and who find it hard to adapt."
ix. Customer Service – jobs in customer service will definitely be affected. Companies are already deployed automatic answering systems or Chatbots to direct calls and sort out matters.
x. Accountants – this profession also deals with number crunching and balance sheets which can be easily achieved by AI. Brett Caraway, associate professor with the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto, said technology hasn't put everybody out of job yet, but it does put some people out of a job. He explained that it is something new and will be interesting to see how disruptive and painful it would be for employment and politics.
According to a survey, 51 percent of employers are considering cutting roles and looking to deploy ChatGPT in their marketing and PR departments. Furthermore, the recent layoffs in Google and Microsoft cited focus on AI and automation. There are also concerns about the loss of human touch. But then this is just the beginning, it's yet to be seen how far robotics and AI will go.
