ChatGPT Could Take Over These White-Collar Jobs Since the Francisco, California-based artificial intelligence firm OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, experts have been analyzing its potential impacts on employment. Rumors of AI taking our jobs have existed for over a decade.
In 2013, researchers at Oxford University predicted that artificial intelligence could replace nearly half (47%) of the American workforce in 20 years. Employees, including at Google, have become increasingly concerned about AI taking over white-collar jobs. Their fears prompted the tech giant to test ChatGPT’s ability to pass a job interview. According to Google, ChatGPT could pass an interview for an L3 entry-level software engineering job with a US$183,000 annual salary. However, when asked whether it will replace programmers, the chatbot says that “it’s unlikely” that an AI tool could replace human creativity and expertise. However, many tasks are mundane, making them potential candidates for automation and potentially replacing millions of workers. For example, ChatGPT is almost excellent at producing marketing copies, emails, and adverts, jobs that employ millions of workers. However, ChatGPT carries a reputational risk for providing inaccurate answers. Despite performing well in technical questions, ChatGPT still frequently provides wrong answers in some coding and mathematical questions.
Interestingly, when it goes off the mark, ChatGPT provides wrong or useless information with a high degree of confidence. More concerning is that ChatGPT could deliberately or inadvertently be used for misinformation because the chatbot has limited knowledge of current events. ChatGPT’s AI model is also trained using online information, which could cause it to regurgitate the existing misinformation or even create its own.
Similarly, ChatGPT’s output depends on the user’s ability to create valuable prompts, which depends on their expertise and mastery of the language. Despite its shortcomings, experts anticipate that AI could replace jobs such as: 1.Tech workers – data analysts, programmers, software engineers 2.Teachers 3.Media-related jobs – content creation, copywriting, advertising, etc. 4.Legal – legal assistants, paralegal 5.Business and finance – financial analysts, researchers, advisors, accountants, traders, etc. The bottom line. ChatGPT is only one of the many chatbots under development, with Google planning to release its own AI chat engine Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) in response to ChatGPT. LaMDA could perform better (or worse) than the Microsoft-backed chatbot, creating more uncertainty in the job market. Over the years, we have learned that every technology has its casualties and beneficiaries.
Even if ChatGPT does not directly replace workers, it will increase the productivity of individual employees, thus reducing the number of workers required to complete a task. However, it will also create another pool of experienced users who will be in demand for their ability to leverage AI tools.