Comment on this story
When ChatGPT launched last November, Olivia Lipkin, a 25-year-old copywriter from San Francisco, didn’t give it much thought. Then, articles about how to use the chatbot in the workplace began to appear in internal Slack groups at the tech start-up where she worked as the company’s sole writer.
Over the next few months, Lipkin’s duties dwindled. Managers started referring to her as “Olivia/ChatGPT” on Slack. She was fired in April with no reason given, but when she saw managers writing about how using ChatGPT was cheaper than paying an author, the reason for her sacking seemed clear.
“Whenever people mentioned ChatGPT, I felt insecure and scared it would replace me,” she said. “Now I actually had proof that it was true, that those fears were valid, and now I was actually out of a job because of AI.”
The quality of artificial intelligence has increased rapidly over the past year, giving birth to chatbots that can have fluent conversations, write songs, and produce computer code. In their quest to make the technology mainstream, Silicon Valley companies are pushing these products to millions of users, often offering them for free – for now.
Some economists believe the technology could replace hundreds of millions of jobs, leading to a catastrophic workforce restructuring mirroring the Industrial Revolution. Skeptics say these fears of job losses are overblown and that AI chatbots are becoming tools that allow people to work faster.
For some workers, the impact is real. Those who write marketing and social media content are in the first wave of people to be replaced by tools like chatbots who seem able to come up with plausible alternatives to their work.
Experts say even advanced AI can’t match a human’s writing skills: it lacks personal voice and style, and often provides incorrect, nonsensical, or biased answers. But for many companies, cutting costs is worth a loss in quality.
“We really are in a crisis,” said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in the digital workforce. “[AI] comes for the jobs that should actually be automation-safe.”
AI and algorithms have been part of the working world for decades. For years, consumer goods companies, grocery stores, and warehouse logistics companies have used predictive algorithms and robots with AI-powered vision systems to make business decisions, automate some routine tasks, and manage inventory. Industrial plants and factories were dominated by robots for much of the 20th century and countless office tasks were replaced by software.
But the recent wave of generative artificial intelligence — which uses complex algorithms trained on billions of words and images from the open internet to produce text, images and audio — holds the potential for a new level of disruption. Experts say the technology’s ability to produce human-sounding prose is targeting high-paid knowledge workers for detachment.
“With every previous automation threat, automation has been about automating the hard, dirty, and repetitive tasks,” said Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “This time, the threat of automation is aimed squarely at the highest-paying, most creative jobs that require… the highest educational background.”
In March, Goldman Sachs predicted that 18 percent of the world’s work could be automated by AI, with white-collar workers like lawyers at higher risk than workers in jobs like construction or maintenance. “Occupations that involve a significant amount of time spent outdoors or involving physical labor cannot be automated by AI,” the report says.
The White House also sounded the alarm, saying in a December report that “AI has the potential to automate ‘non-routine’ tasks, exposing large new segments of the workforce to potential disruption.”
But Mollick said it’s too early to gauge just how disruptive AI will be for the workforce. He pointed out that jobs such as copywriting, document translation and transcription, and working as a paralegal are particularly at risk, as these are tasks that chatbots can easily handle. High quality legal analysis, creative writing or art may not be that easy to replace, he said, as humans still outperform AI in these areas.
“In general, think of AI as acting like a high-end intern,” he said. “Jobs, which are mostly designed as entry-level jobs to get you involved in a field where you’re doing something worthwhile, but they’re also sort of a stepping stone to the next level — these are jobs that are under threat.”
Eric Fein ran his content writing business for 10 years, charging $60 an hour to write everything from 150-word bathmat descriptions to website copy for cannabis companies. The 34-year-old from Bloomingdale, Illinois, has ten ongoing contracts to build a stable business that provides half his annual income and provides a comfortable living for his wife and two-year-old son.
But in March, Fein received a message from its largest client: its services would no longer be needed as the company would switch to ChatGPT. Fein’s nine other contracts were gradually terminated for the same reason. His entire copywriting business disappeared almost overnight.
“It wiped me out,” Fein said. He urged his customers to rethink and warned that ChatGPT could not write content with its level of creativity, technical precision and originality. He said his customers understood that, but were told that using ChatGPT was far cheaper than paying him his hourly wage.
Fein was rehired by one of his clients who was not happy with ChatGPT’s work. But it’s not enough to support him and his family, who have to stay financially secure for a little over six months before they run out of money.
Now Fein has decided to take a job that AI can’t do and has enrolled in courses to become an HVAC technician. Next year he wants to do an apprenticeship as a plumber.
“One trade is more future-proof,” he said.
Companies that replaced their employees with chatbots faced major problems. When technology news site CNET used artificial intelligence to write articles, the results were riddled with errors and required lengthy corrections. A lawyer who relied on ChatGPT for legal opinion cited numerous fictitious cases. And the National Eating Disorders Association, which fired its hotline staff and reportedly replaced it with a chatbot, stopped using the technology after it distributed insensitive and harmful advice.
Roberts said chatbots can cause costly mistakes and that companies rushing to integrate ChatGPT into operations are “hasty”. Because they predict the statistically most likely word in a sentence, they intentionally produce average content. That presents companies with a difficult choice, she said: quality vs. cost.
“We have to ask ourselves: is a facsimile good enough? Is imitation good enough? Is that all we care about?” she said. “We will lower the level of quality, and for what purpose? So that the company owners and shareholders can get a bigger piece of the pie?”
Lipkin, the copywriter who found out she was replaced by ChatGPT, is completely rethinking her office work. She first got into content marketing to make a living while pursuing her own creative writing. But she found the job burned her out and made it difficult for her to write herself. Now she is starting a job as a dog handler.
“I’m taking a complete break from the office world,” Lipkin said. “People are looking for the cheapest solution, and that’s not a human, it’s a robot.”
