Generative artificial intelligence has taken the world by storm. Tools such as ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Bing Chat, Midjourney and DALL-E are trained using human-created content and can generate text or images based on user prompts.
Because the premise of many Generative AI tools is to automate a lot of the tasks––and even jobs––humans do, you won’t get a prize for guessing that search interest in the term “will AI take my job” has rocketed over the past six months.
The jury is out on the long-term repercussions of generative AI, but warnings have been issued by Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI”, who announced his resignation from Google in May.
Hinton said he now regretted his work, and that some of the dangers around AI chatbots were “quite scary”, pointing out that “right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”
His concern was echoed by the recent Statement on AI Risk, issued by the Center for AI Safety. Signed by a group of top AI researchers, engineers, and CEOs, the statement says that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Despite those warnings, there has been a huge curiosity surge around the technology, with ChatGPT racking up over 100 million users in a record-breaking three-month period from February 2023 to April 2023.
Jobs outlook
What the average worker wants to know right now is if they’ll still have a job in a few years’ time.
Professional services company Accenture thinks that 40% of all working hours could be impacted by generative AI tools, while a Goldman Sachs study says that generative AI tools could impact as many as 300 million full-time jobs worldwide. The report also agrees that “Worker displacement from automation has historically been offset by creation of new jobs”.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) however, estimates 97 million new jobs will emerge by 2025 to enable humans and machines to work together. Another report says that generative AI can be considered in an assistant capacity for many jobs. It estimates that it can do at least 50% of tedious tasks for accountants, writers, mathematicians, PR specialists, and blockchain engineers.
The rise of AI technologies is also likely to lead to the creation of brand new jobs. One of those roles is prompt engineering. The World Economic Forum says it is the number one “job of the future”.
It refers to the process of designing and refining prompts to achieve desired outcomes when using large language models.
Others say that problem formulation experts will be on the rise, as people with the skills to clearly define problems and then analyse and delineate them, are needed.
As chatbot-powered customer service solutions become increasingly popular, AI trainers are also required as they manage the data that represents the core knowledge of a chatbot or voice assistant.
Reducing bias and increasing fairness in algorithmic systems is the role of an AI ethics expert. As AI receives increasing oversight, for example with the recent passing of a draft law called the EU AI Act by The European Parliament, this represents a step forward in how governments will regulate generative AI.
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