Work: meet people who lost jobs to AI – 07/10/2023 – Market

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 the company.

At the end of last year, however, the company introduced an AI (artificial intelligence) system.

“At the time, the idea was to work closely with human copywriters to help speed up the process, simplify things a little bit more,” he says.

Meadowcroft was not particularly impressed with the AI ​​work.

“It kind of made everybody look level and on the fence and exactly the same, and because of that, nobody really stood out.”

The content also needed to be checked by a human team to ensure it hadn’t been pulled from anywhere else.

Resignation

However, the artificial intelligence was fast. What a human copywriter might take between 60 and 90 minutes to write, the AI ​​was able to do in ten minutes or less.

About four months after the technology was introduced, Meadowcroft’s four-person team was laid off.

Meadowcroft isn’t sure, but he’s almost certain that the AI ​​has replaced them.

“I used to laugh at the idea that AI could replace writers, or affect my work, until this happened,” he says.

jobs at risk

The latest wave of artificial intelligence came late last year when OpenAI released ChatGPT.

Backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT can provide human-like responses to questions and can, in a matter of minutes, generate essays, speeches and even recipes.

Other big tech companies are also introducing their own systems — Google, for example, launched Bard in March.

Although not perfect, these systems are trained to search, in the ocean of data available on the internet, an amount of information impossible to digest even for a team of humans.

This makes many people wonder what kinds of jobs might be at risk.

Earlier this year, a Goldman Sachs report said that artificial intelligence could potentially replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs.

The loss of jobs would not happen in the same way in all sectors of the economy.

According to the report, 46% of administrative tasks and 44% of legal professions could be automated, but only 6% in construction and 4% in maintenance.

The report also indicates that the introduction of artificial intelligence could increase productivity and growth and could generate new jobs.

There is already some evidence of this.

The case of IKEA

In June, IKEA said that since 2021, it has trained 8,500 employees working in its call centers as design consultants.

The company says that 47% of customer calls are now answered by an artificial intelligence named Billie.

While IKEA does not anticipate any job losses as a result of using artificial intelligence, these developments have many people concerned.

A recent survey by BCG (Boston Consulting Group), which surveyed 12,000 workers around the world, found that a third were concerned about being replaced by artificial intelligence at work – and frontline staff were more concerned than that. than managers.

Jessica Apotheker of BCG says this is partly due to fear of the unknown.

“When you look at leaders and managers, more than 80% of them use artificial intelligence at least weekly. When you look at frontline people, that number drops to 20%. anxiety and worry for them about the results.”

But perhaps there is good reason to be anxious.

An example on YouTube

For three months last year, Alejandro Graue did voiceover work for a popular YouTube channel.

It looked like a promising type of work, all the channel’s content in English needed to be dubbed into Spanish.

Graue went on vacation at the end of last year confident there would be work when he got back.

“I was counting on that money to live on. I have two daughters, so I need the money,” he says.

However, to his surprise, before returning to work, the YouTube channel published a new video in Spanish — which he had not worked on.

“When I clicked on the video, what I heard was not my voice, but an AI-generated voice — very poorly synced dubbing. It was terrible. And I was like, What is this? It’s going to be my new co-worker on the channel ? Or are you going to replace me?”, he recalls.

A phone call to the studio where he worked confirmed the worst. The customer wanted to try artificial intelligence because it was cheaper and faster.

The experiment turned out to be a failure.

Viewers complained about the quality of the voice acting, and ultimately the channel pulled videos that featured the AI-generated voice, but Graue didn’t find this very reassuring.

He believes technology will only get better and wonders where voice actors like him will end up.

“If this starts to happen to all the jobs I have, what should 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 too? It’s too complicated,” he says.

Collaboration

If AI doesn’t replace your job, chances are you need to start working with it somehow.

After a few months of freelancing, former copywriter Dean Meadowcroft took a new tack.

He now works for an employee assistance provider, which offers wellness and mental health advice to teams.

Working with artificial intelligence is now part of your role.

“I think that’s where the future of artificial intelligence is, offering quick access to human-led content rather than eliminating that human aspect entirely,” he says.

The text was published here.