If you’re anything like me and have a very limited understanding of robot capabilities outside of I, Robot, Blade Runner, and Ex Machina, you’ll know that human = good, machine = bad.
In this week’s edition of Robots Taking Over The World, experts have revealed the jobs most at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence — and we might as well just pack it up now.
In bad news for journalists (hi), software developers, finance bros, graphics designers, and teachers, your job is probs going to be replaced by a robot in the near future. I’ve seen enough dystopian movies to know that this is obviously going to end up perfectly fine with robots absolutely NOT turning on humanity (honestly, can’t blame them).
The conversations come after the launch of ChatGPT last November — a wildly intelligent chatbot that’s free to the public. ChatGPT can write emails, essays, poetry and songs, pen entire articles, give you a brand new resume, solve tricky maths problems and generate lines of code. It can even give you relationship advice. Is there anything she can’t do? Slay.
@pedestriantv I mean it put Kath and Kim at number 5 so how powerful can it really be?#australia #kathandkim #tvshows #chatgpt #ai
And while some of us have just been obliviously living it up and getting the AI program to write new songs in the style of Nick Cave, we should actually be waaaay more concerned about this new tech than we are.
“AI is replacing the white-collar workers. I don’t think anyone can stop that,” Pengcheng Shi, associate dean in the department of computing and information sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, told the New York Post.
“This is not crying wolf. The wolf is at the door.”
Chinmay Hedge, a computer science and electrical engineering associate professor at New York University, warned The Post about the jobs most likely to get the boot.
“Certain jobs in sectors such as journalism, higher education, graphic and software design — these are at risk of being supplemented by AI.”
And as a journalist and someone with half of a teaching degree, this is absolutely fantastic news.
Education
There’s already been lots of chat about how the technology will impact schooling, with ChatGPT already seeing students cheat and literally have the bot write entire essays or assignments (tbh, you have to admire the resourcefulness).
The program has already been banned in NSW, Queensland, and Tasmanian public schools.
But it’s not just impacting students — it’s also potentially making the roles of teachers — TEACHERS!!! — obsolete, with Shi arguing that it can already be used to teach classes.
“Although it has bugs and inaccuracies in terms of knowledge, this can be easily improved. Basically, you just need to train the ChatGPT,” Shi continued.
Shi and Hedge maintain that university-level courses will need a physical (read: non-robot) teacher for the foreseeable future, but did suggest that, in theory, ChatGPT could be your new professor and literally teach classes.
Software Engineering
In proper sick fuck news, software engineers, the people who are the literal parents and CREATORS of ChatGPT, are likely to see their jobs impacted by this new tech, with Hedge warning that website designers and engineers responsible for relatively simple coding are at risk of saying ciao to their jobs.
“I worry for such people. Now I can just ask ChatGPT to generate a website for me — any type of person whose routine job would be doing this for me is no longer needed,” Hedge told The Post.
Essentially, smartypants ChatGPT has the ability to draft code to build sites and other pieces of IT. I’m not a tech dude, but that sounds like very bad news.
“As time goes on, probably today or the next three, five, ten years, those software engineers, if their job is to know how to code … I don’t think they will be broadly needed,” Shi said.
Finance
Bad news, finance bros. You’re not exempt.
Shi predicts that Wall Street could see many jobs being punted in the coming years and replaced by our new overlord, ChatGPT.
“I definitely think [it will impact] the trading side, but even [at] an investment bank, people [are] hired out of college and spend two, three years to work like robots and do Excel modelling — you can get AI to do that,” he explained. “Much, much faster.”
That said, Shi explains that humans will still be needed to make crucial financial and economic decisions, while the data sheets are likely to be yeeted into ChatGPT land.
I can already hear the simultaneous screams of a thousand trust-fund babies, sobbing into their boat shoes.
Graphic Design
But even the arts are not immune. SAD.
ChatGPT’s older sis, DALL-E (also developed by OpenAI), is a tool that essentially generates digital images from user-generated prompts.
“Before, you would ask a photographer or you would ask a graphic designer to make an image [for websites]. That’s something very, very plausibly automated by using technology similar to ChatGPT,” Hedge said.
Here’s one I prepared earlier, dubbed “Absolute RATBAG, ChatGPT, stealing the jobs of Pedestrian TV staff who are very hot and good-looking.”
I, for one, welcome our new rat overlords.
Journalism
And of course, what’s a story about robots STEALING our jobs without them coming for PTV staff and journalism as a whole?
“Copy editing is certainly something it does an extremely good job at. Summarising, making an article concise and things of that nature, it certainly does a really good job,” Hedge said. ChatGPT is also said to be very good at designing its own headlines, so RIP to the entire Pedestrian roster.
But there’s one silver lining we can at least bask in. The tool isn’t very good at fact-checking.
“You can ask it to provide an essay, to produce a story with citations, but more often than not, the citations are just made up,” Hegde continued. “That’s a known failure of ChatGPT and honestly we do not know how to fix that.”
Below, I asked THE ChatGPT about how it felt about stealing my job. Very meta.
“It is possible that ChatGPT or any other language generation models could be used to assist with certain tasks in journalism, such as generating news summaries or writing simple news articles,” ChatGPT informed me.
“It is unlikely that these models will fully replace human journalists as they lack the ability to understand context and emotions, to report, to research, and to verify the information.”
Turns out, my inclination towards being a drama queen and crying over insects drowning in pools is GOOD NEWS when it comes to the journalism world as it gives me the ability to understand human emotions, which ChatGPT, a robot, surprisingly does not have.
So there you have it — the world isn’t just the closest to ending that it’s ever been, but on the way there, we’ll be taught by sexy robot professors, see the exodus of thousands of finance bros, and the entire Pedestrian TV roster to replaced by hotter, more mechanic versions of ourselves. Love that for us.
