Until recently, Dean Meadowcroft was a copywriter in a small marketing department.
His duties included writing press releases, social media posts and other content for his company.
But then, late last year, his firm introduced an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system.
“At the time, the idea was to work alongside human copywriters to help speed up processes, essentially streamline things a little bit more,” he says.
Meadowcroft wasn’t particularly impressed with the AI work.
“It made everything sound flat, we were all exactly the same, and so there was no one that really stood out.”
The content also had to be reviewed by human staff to make sure it hadn’t been taken from anywhere else.
Fired
But the AI was fast.
What took a human copywriter 60 to 90 minutes to write, the AI could do in 10 minutes or less.
About four months after the AI was introduced, Meadowcroft’s four-person team was laid off.
Meadowcroft isn’t absolutely certain, but he’s pretty sure the AI replaced them.
“I laughed at the possibility that the AI could replace the writers or that it was going to affect my work, until it did,” he said.
Jobs at risk
The latest wave of AI came late last year when OpenAI launched ChatGPT.
Backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT can give human-like answers to all kinds of questions and also, within minutes, generate essays, speeches and even recipes.
Other tech giants also introduced their own systems: Google launched Bard in March.
And while not perfect, these systems are trained to dive into the ocean of data available on the Internet, an amount of information impossible for even a team of humans to digest.
That has left many wondering what kinds of jobs might be at risk.
Earlier this year, a Goldman Sachs report said that AI could possibly replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs.
And this loss of jobs would not fall equally across all strata of the economy.
According to the report, 46% of tasks in administrative professions and 44% in legal professions could be automated, but only 6% in construction and 4% in maintenance.
The report also notes that the introduction of AI could boost productivity and growth and could create new jobs.
There is already some evidence of that.
The IKEA case
This month IKEA said that, since 2021, it has trained 8,500 employees working in its call centers as design consultants.
The furniture giant says 47% of customer calls are now handled by an AI called Billie.
Although IKEA does not estimate that there will be any job losses as a result of the use of AI, such developments are worrying many people.
A recent survey by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which polled 12,000 workers around the world, found that a third were worried that AI will replace them at work, with front-line staff more concerned than managers.
BCG’s Jessica Apotheker says that, in part, that’s due to fear of the unknown.
“When you look at leaders and managers, more than 80% of them use AI at least once a week. When you look at front-line staff, that number drops to 20%, so unfamiliarity with the technology brings a lot more anxiety and concern about outcomes for them.”
But maybe there’s a good reason to be anxious.
YouTube and AI
Last year, for three months, Alejandro Graue did dubbing work for a popular YouTube channel.
It seemed to be a promising line of work, an entire English YouTube channel had to be translated into Spanish.
Graue went on vacation at the end of the year confident there would be work when he returned.
“I was counting on that income to live on. I have two daughters, so I need the money,” he says.
But to his surprise, before he returned to work, the YouTube channel uploaded a new video in Spanish, one he hadn’t worked on.
“When I clicked on it, what I heard was not my voice, but an AI-generated voice, a very poorly synchronized voiceover. It was terrible. And I was like, what is this, am I going to get a new partner in the channel or is this going to replace me?” he says.
A phone call to the studio he was working for confirmed the worst.
The client wanted to experiment with AI because it was cheaper and faster.
That experiment turned out to be a failure.
Viewers complained about the quality of the voiceover, and eventually the channel removed the videos featuring the AI-generated voice.
But Graue didn’t find that very comforting.
He thinks the technology will improve and wonders where voiceover artists like him will end up.
“If this starts happening in every job I have, what do I do – should I buy a farm? I don’t know. What other job could I look for that won’t be replaced in the future? It’s very complicated,” he says.
Collaboration
But even if the AI can’t replace you, it’s likely to cooperate in some way in your labors.
After a few months of freelance work, former copywriter Dean Meadowcroft took a new direction.
He now works for an employee assistance provider, which provides wellness and mental health advice to staff.
Working with AI is now part of his job.
“I think that’s where the future of AI lies, giving quick access to human-driven content, rather than removing that factor altogether,” he says.
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