“We’re all just hoping that our clients will recognize [our] value.”
Relatable
Anxious about AI taking your job? According to a new report from the BBC, you’re not alone.
“I’m amazed at how quickly ChatGPT has become so sophisticated,” Claire, a 34-year-old PR worker who kept her last name private, told the BBC. “Give it a few more years, and I can absolutely imagine a world in which a bot does my job just as well as I can,” she added. “I hate to think what that might mean for my employability.”
“I think a lot of creatives are concerned,” 29-year-old Alys Marshall, a Bristol, UK-based copywriter, echoed to the BBC. “We’re all just hoping that our clients will recognize [our] value, and choose the authenticity of [a human] over the price and convenience of AI tools.”
Economic Anxiety
Frankly, anxiety around the impact of AI on the job market right now isn’t exactly unwarranted. Rest of World reported just last week that Chinese videogame illustrators are already being put out of work by their digital counterparts, while a number of publishers have already started to experiment — often quietly, as we’ve discovered in our reporting — with AI-generated content.
There’s also the fact that in a recent memo, Goldman Sachs predicted that AI may automate 300 million jobs. (For context, according to the US Census Bureau’s population clock, there are roughly 334 million humans living in America today.)
Some experts say that those fearing automation should instead focus on controlling what they can control. Just ride the techno-wave, baby.
“It is normal to feel anxiety about the impact of AI because its evolution is fluid, and there are many unknown application factors,” Carolyn Montrose, a career coach and lecturer at Columbia University, told the BBC.
Montrose also apparently thinks that anxiety is a choice, and any concerned workers out there should “choose to feel anxious about AI, or empowered to learn about it and use it to their advantage.”
Great. Cool. But while there is some merit — if only due to necessity — to figuring out how to incorporate AI into your workflow as a means of getting ahead, doing so doesn’t mean that a CEO somewhere won’t jump at the chance to fire employees in droves regardless. And while human society has historically adjusted to accommodate major technological changes within workforces, adjustment takes time, and AI development and integration is moving rapidly.
But hey, just breathe through it, we guess?