AI Comes for the Writers
Truckers no longer first to the chopping block
Experts have long imagined that blue collar workers like truckers or factory workers would be the first to lose jobs to artificial intelligence implementation. Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang suggested that a possible collapse of trucking industry jobs, caused by the perfecting and popularization of self-driving vehicles, had the potential to cause civil turmoil as millions of people suddenly found themselves without a paycheck. Job loss to AI has largely been considered a working class problem.
Likewise, smart people surmised that those whose jobs revolved around pattern recognition, like radiologists, would soon be handing over their jobs to a very smart computer algorithm that can spot a tumor or a cyst with much higher accuracy than human eyes. AI expert and AI Superpowers author Kai-Fu Lee has gone even further, predicting that doctors would soon find themselves largely relegated to a vestigial function as the “warm” human customer service representative for largely AI-conducted treatment, gently chiding MDs to work on their people skills. Numbers crunchers like accountants were also likely to be in some trouble.
However, these past analyses have largely ignored the dirty realities of actual AI implementation. Subsequently, the release of the ChatGPT tool by artificial intelligence company OpenAI last week should be causing most people to revise their ideas about the trajectory of AI’s impact on labor markets. Specifically, they should be rethinking whose jobs will be first to the chopping block. (Spoiler alert: the answer is writers).
If you aren’t aware of this very fun and very scary new AI tool, let me fill you in:
ChatGPT is terrifyingly robust chatbot, capable of spitting out thousands of words on any given subject based on your broad prompt. It’s equally adept at composing a version of Bohemian Rhapsody about a woman with a pathological fear of fish as it is writing business proposals, news items, midbrow opinion pieces, or Wikipedia-style essays. While there are clearly some guardrails written into it: ChatGPT will refuse to write legal contracts for example, they are very easy to circumvent.
Fool around with the chatbot for a few minutes, which is fun and easy to use, and it should become very clear that many people who make their living from writing are in grave danger of losing their jobs. Content marketers, and paralegals whose main function is to write mind-numbing legal briefs are the two that immediately come to mind here, but there are many other examples.
What should scare the shit out of anyone who writes for a living is how unbelievably flexible and easy to use this tool is. Why pay someone $30 dollars an hour to write inane search-engine-optimized marketing content if ChatGPT can do nearly as good a job in moments? (The chatbot’s work does require a little proof-reading, it seemingly intentionally inserts factual inaccuracies, perhaps so as not to be too scary).
The key point to consider when thinking about what part of the job market AI implementation is likely to strike first is acceptable margin of error.
When it comes to jobs that take place in the real world, especially jobs that put the lives of others on the line, like driving a vehicle or searching an MRI for a patient’s tumors, almost no margin of error is acceptable. The slightest inaccuracy in the guidance of a self-driving eighteen wheeler has the potential to kill dozens of people and cause massive damage. A missed tumor can be the difference between life or death. For AI to be able to take someone’s job in high-consequence occupations like these, the possibility of error has to be truly reduced to almost nothing. This means that these professions, and others that involve operating large machinery or making healthcare decisions, are likely to be safe, at least for a while.
Not so in writing. The stakes for a typo, inaccuracy, or syntactical guffaw produced by an AI writer are not very high. ChatGPT, as is, pretty much ready for use to produce low-level written content. We should begin revising our projections for whose jobs will go to Skynet first by thinking about where AI implementation is the least risky. We thought Walmart-goers would be first to the scaffolding, but it turns out it might be white collar workers.
That said, I don’t expect to see rioting at Trader Joes quite yet. For now at least, higher-tier jobs are probably safe. This sort of AI writing tool is imitative, not inventive. People who write marketing content should be very worried, people who design broad-scope marketing campaigns and crunch analytic data into client presentations are probably safe for a while longer. The paralegals who write the lengthy contract of lawyerly text are in danger, but the exponentially better-paid attorney who then inserts dastardly legal loopholes and clauses has a moat around his role for a while longer. But the machines are coming.