“ChatGPT does like 80 percent of my job if I’m being honest.”
Overemployed
An emerging group — calling themselves, incredibly, the “overemployed” — are harnessing the power of generative AI to work multiple full-time jobs at the same time, Vice reports.
It’s perhaps an early sign that the automation of jobs is about to accelerate significantly and strangely in the age of AI chatbots.
“That’s the only reason I got my job this year,” one such worker told the publication. “ChatGPT does like 80 percent of my job if I’m being honest,” adding that he even used the chatbot to apply for jobs.
Despite the tool sometimes getting stuff wrong, that worker said he only had to make relatively “minor” adjustments to fix the copy he was delivering to his boss. In fact, he even went as far as to use ChatGPT to draft responses to Slack messages from his manager.
AI Juggling Act
Another “overemployed” worker, who also spoke to Vice on the condition of anonymity, said they were able to generate useful code to work three financial reporting jobs at once. And a university lecturer was able to juggle their teaching job with running a digital marketing agency and even a tech startup.
While working several jobs at once is generally frowned upon, these workers don’t think they’re doing anything wrong.
“I never could mentally comprehend why it was so taboo for me to work two salaried positions,” one tech worker told Vice.
It’s a trend that, according to some of the publication’s sources, could accelerate the automation of jobs at the hands of highly sophisticated algorithms capable of fulfilling a wide variety of human jobs — if employers were to ever catch on, that is.
In other words, it’s in their interest to keep the fact they’re filling several full-time positions at once on the down low.
Because the alternative could be the dissolution of a vast number of salaried positions.
“It’s gonna be one loom operator, as opposed to, you know, 100 weavers,” one source told Vice.
More on generative AI and jobs: These Are the Jobs Most Vulnerable to AI, Researchers Say