The Way to Think about AI and Jobs

It’s been a couple of months now since ChatGPT exploded on the scene and managed to get 100 million users within about two months – an unheard of speed of use capture. Over the past few days, I’ve been either reading or watching videos of dire job implications arising from this new AI intelligence.

I’m not going to list all of the articles or videos, largely because I did not save them, but I will provide a link to the one I did save. The reason why I chose to save this particular video was because of a single depressing test the video hosts did.

So first, here’s the video where the hosts discuss how wrong they were on the speed of development of ChatGPT since the end of last November (2022):

The part that caught my interest and distressed me was the poll they did with their followers who were mostly photographers. The test consisted of 3 pictures and the video hosts asked which of the three photos did the followers prefer.

About 2/3s of the voters preferred one of the AI generated photos.

When they said that, I looked at their faces and saw very glum expressions. Yep, me too.

Even though this was a single test and would really require many more to develop a solid result, this single result could have PROFOUND implications.

Let me get into my little theory what this AI invasion could mean, and I probably alluded to it in this posting here. Basically, AI will bring a minimum standard of quality to writing, photography, art that all people will be able to reach, just by using this tool. So if you couldn’t write, this AI will brought you up to at least the level of that found throughout the internet, what I call some miminum average.

If there is a normal distribution of writing skills:

The entire left side of the curve are those who cannot write well, so automatically they will struggle with jobs requiring good writing skills and they could be precluded from a few jobs. If you are a solopreneur or a small business owner, you might outsource and hire someone to do the writing for you.

Just for illustrative purposes, let’s say those who can write would be those occupying the right side of the curve. The freelancers of sort could span the entire spectrum of the right side of the curve. The really, really good writers who can command the big dollars occupy the far-right end of the scale.

Now ChatGPT, or whatever AI, comes along and can drink up the writings found on the internet, so it starts to kind of take an average of the overall writing. The pink areas could be where the skill level of ChatGPT fall. Now, everybody on the left-hand side of the curve has access to the writing skills found in the pink area and this pink area becomes the bare minimum or table stakes. This is great for those whose writing skills leave much to be desired.

…But puts pressure on those who has made a living writing, especially if they were residing in the pink areas. Even those with better skills to the right of the pink area might feel some pressure as the AI breathes down their neck.

But I made a guess as to where the AI’s skill could fall. Suppose AI was trained to also include very good writers, so the skillset starts to move to the right.

Or maybe even this…

The AI’s skillset could start to shift to the right, encroaching on the grounds of the truly gifted writers. The minimum writing standards starts to lift higher and becomes accessible to more and more people.

So, if you are a business owner who used to hire writers to write for you, now you can just “hire” the AI, which is coming free, to do the job for you at a much faster rate. I mean, 5 minutes versus a day or a couple of days…there’s no competition.

Those who can write are going to have to figure out what it is that they can do that AI cannot.

The only way to do that is to play with it, work with it, get familiar with it.

I see no other way.

This is not just for writers, but for photographers, for artists, for designers, for researchers, and maybe others I haven’t thought of. Coders, analysts.

Some of you might say, “But not if we use AI to complement our skills!”

That’s a nice concept but we have another concept called capitalism and shareholders. Shareholders look to reducing the costs to the lowest possible. That’s our dilemma. Every time our economy starts to dip and companies feel the need to reduce costs, which is essentially labor (what are we going through right now?), the urge to replace labor with AI so as not to lose productivity will be so strong that it will be impossible to ignore.

We are probably going to approach a point where people will decide that capitalism will need to change.

Oh, by the way, that image used to open this post? That was arranged by Microsoft Designer. I uploaded two of my images into Designer to see what it would do. It gave me a couple of options. It’s a very different style than my usual imagery and it didn’t take long to develop.