생성 AI로 사라질 직업과 생겨날 직업
챗 GPT의 등장으로 AI가 인간 노동을 대체할 것이란 우려가 커진다. 7년 전 이세돌과 알파고 대결 당시 대두됐던 'AI 공포'가 실체가 됐다는 평가다.
전문가들은 반복적이고 정형화된 업무를 수행하는 직종은 대거 사라질 가능성이 높다고 진단한다. 이에 산업혁명 시절 '러다이트 운동'(기계파괴)과 같은 사회 혼란이 발생할 수 있다는 우려와 인간이 창의력과 통찰력을 발휘하는 업무에 집중해 효율성을 높일 수 있다는 기대가 교차한다.
생성 AI가 대중화되면서 AI가 대체할 수 있는 직업이 늘고 있다. 콜센터 상담 직원·사무원·프로그래머·기자·회계사·통역사 등 단순 반복 업무를 수행하는 직업뿐 아니라 의사·약사·변호사·리서치 통계 연구원 등 전문직까지 위태롭다는 관측이 나온다. AI가 맥락을 이해하기 시작하면서 논리적으로 복잡한 내용까지 분석할 수 있게 됐기 때문이다.
리서치보고서·소장·회계감사보고서·기사 등 일정 형태에 맞춰 결과물을 내는 직업은 대부분 대체가 될 수 있다. 기존에 10명이 작성하던 리서치 보고서도 인사이트를 찾을 1명이면 충분할 것.
이로 인해 일자리 '부익부 빈익빈'이 심화될 것이란 전망도 있다. 사람이 만드는 글·그림·영상까지 AI가 만들면서 하청업체들이 사라지고 콘텐츠를 관리·기획 인력만 전문가만 형태로 남을 것"이라며 "이렇게 되면 기계나 자동화 기술을 쓸 필요가 없는 자투리 감정노동 등 더 나쁜 일자리로 사람들이 몰릴 수 있다.
반면, 생성 AI로 인간이 단순노동에서 해방될 것이란 기대도 있다. 오히려 인간의 창작영역을 넓혀주기도 한다. 그림을 못 그려도 AI의 도움을 받아 웹툰을 그리고, 스토리라인과 문체를 제공하면 소설도 쓸 수 있는 게 대표적이다.
과거엔 아주 전문적인 훈련을 받은 사람만 할 수 있었던 일을 보통 시민도 할 수 있게 된다. 이런 방식으로 AI를 활용하면 사회 전체가 미학적으로 변하게 된다.
신기술 도입 초기엔 혼란이 있지만, 궁극적으론 사회적 효용을 늘릴 것이다. 1800년대 말까진 카메라로 찍은 풍경·정물사진을 예술품으로 보지 않았으나, 지금은 사진작가란 직업까지 생길 정도로 예술적 가치를 인정받고 있다. AI로 누구나 창작물을 만들고 콘텐츠가 풍부해지면 그 혜택은 인간이 누릴 것이다.
챗GPT로 '생성 AI' 시대가 본격화됨에 따라 다양한 윤리적 문제가 제기된다. 당장 시끄러운 곳은 대학 등 학계다. AI를 활용한 과제나 논문 대필이 벌써부터 빈번하게 포착돼서다. 실제 챗 GPT로 논문을 '대필'하는 사례가 이어지면서 미국 뉴욕시는 공립학교 내 챗 GPT 접속을 차단했고 조지워싱턴대는 AI 영향력 밖인 구술시험과 그룹평가를 확대하기로 했다. 아예 시험과 과제물 제출에 컴퓨터대신 수기 시험을 확대하는 곳들도 늘고 있다. 영국의 130여 개 대학은 챗 GPT가 에세이나 리포트 작성에 악용될 수 있다고 우려하는 성명을 냈다. 국제머신러닝학회(ICML)는 AI 도구를 활용해 과학논문을 작성하는 것을 금지했다.
Generative AI, Jobs Disappearing, Jobs Coming
Since its release in November of last year, OpenAI's ChatGPT has been used to write cover letters, create a children's book, and even help students cheat on their essays.
The chatbot may be more powerful than we ever imagined. Google found that, in theory, the search engine would hire the bot as an entry-level coder if it interviewed at the company.
Amazon employees who tested ChatGPT said it does a "very good job" of answering customer support questions, is "great" at making training documents, and is "very strong" at answering queries around corporate strategy.
However, users of ChatGPT also found that the bot can generate misinformation, incorrectly answer coding problems, and produce errors in basic math.
While a 2013 University of Oxford study found that 47% of US jobs could be eliminated by AI over the next 20 years, that prediction appears to have been off-base.
Anu Madgavkar, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, said that's because human judgement still needs to be applied to these technologies to avoid error and bias, she told Insider.
"We have to think about these things as productivity enhancing tools, as opposed to complete replacements," Madgavkar said.
Insider talked to experts and conducted research to compile a list of jobs that are at highest-risk for replacement by AI.
Tech jobs (Coders, computer programmers, software engineers, data analysts)
Coding and computer programming are in-demand skills, but it's possible that ChatGPT and similar AI tools may fill in some of the gaps in the near future.
Tech jobs such as software developers, web developers, computer programmers, coders, and data scientists are "pretty amenable" to AI technologies "displacing more of their work," Madgavkar said.
That's because AI like ChatGPT is good at crunching numbers with relative accuracy.
In fact, advanced technologies like ChatGPT could produce code faster than humans, which means that work can be completed with fewer employees, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who has researched AI's impact on the American workforce, told Insider.
"What took a team of software developers might only take some of them," he added.
Tech companies like ChatGPT maker's OpenAI are already considering replacing software engineers with AI.
Still, Oded Netzer, a Columbia Business School professor, thinks that AI will help coders rather than replace them.
"In terms of jobs, I think it's primarily an enhancer than full replacement of jobs," Netzer told CBS MoneyWatch. "Coding and programming is a good example of that. It actually can write code quite well."
Media jobs (advertising, content creation, technical writing, journalism)
Media jobs across the board — including those in advertising, technical writing, journalism, and any role that involves content creation — may be affected by ChatGPT and similar forms of AI, Madgavkar said. That's because AI is able to read, write, and understand text-based data well, she added.
"Analyzing and interpreting vast amounts of language based data and information is a skill that you'd expect generative AI technologies to ramp up on," Madgavkar said.
Economist Paul Krugman said in a New York Times op-ed that ChatGPT may be able to do tasks like reporting and writing "more efficiently than humans."
The media industry is already beginning to experiment with AI-generated content. Tech news site CNET used an AI tool similar to ChatGPT to write dozens of articles — though the publisher has had to issue a number of corrections — and BuzzFeed announced that it will use tech from the ChatGPT maker to generate new forms of content.
But Madgavkar said that the majority of work done by content creators is not automatable.
"There's a ton of human judgment that goes into each of these occupations," she said.
Legal industry jobs (paralegals, legal assistants)
Like media roles, jobs in the legal industry such as paralegals and legal assistants are responsible for consuming large amounts of information, synthesizing what they learned, then making it digestible through a legal brief or opinion.
Language-oriented roles like these are susceptible to automation, Madgavkar said.
"The data is actually quite structured, very language-oriented, and therefore quite amenable to generative AI," she added.
But again, AI won't fully be able to automate these jobs since it requires a degree of human judgement to understand what a client or employer wants.
"It's almost like a bit of a productivity boost that some of these occupations might get, because you can use tools that actually do this better," Madgavkar said.
Market research analysts
AI is good at analyzing data and predicting outcomes, Muro said. That is why market research analysts may be susceptible to AI-driven change.
Market research analysts are responsible for collecting data, identifying trends within that data, and then using what they found to design an effective marketing campaign or decide where to place advertising.
"Those are things that we're now seeing that AI could handle," Muro said.
Teachers
Teachers across the country are worried about students using ChatGPT to cheat on their homework, but according to Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the department of computing and information sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, they should also be thinking about their job security.
ChatGPT "can easily teach classes already," Shi told the New York Post.
"Although it has bugs and inaccuracies in terms of knowledge, this can be easily improved," he said. "Basically, you just need to train the ChatGPT."
Finance jobs (Financial analysts, personal financial advisors)
Like market research analysts, financial analysts, personal financial advisors, and other jobs in personal finance that require manipulating significant amounts of numerical data can be affected by AI, Muro, the researcher at The Brookings Institute, said.
"AI can identify trends in the market, highlight what investments in a portfolio are doing better and worse, communicate all that, and then use various other forms of data by, say, a financial company to forecast a better investment mix," Muro said.
These analysts make a lot of money, he said, but parts of their jobs are automatable.
Traders
The Rochester Institute of Technology's Shi also told the New York Post that certain Wall Street roles could be in jeopardy as well.
"At an investment bank, people are hired out of college, and spend two, three years to work like robots and do Excel modeling — you can get AI to do that," he said.
Graphic designers
In a December Harvard Business Review post, three professors pointed to DALL-E, an AI tool that can generate images in seconds, as a potential disruptor of the graphic design industry.
"Upskilling millions of people in their ability to create and manipulate images will have a profound impact on the economy," they wrote, adding that "these recent advances in AI will surely usher in a period of hardship and economic pain for some whose jobs are directly impacted and who find it hard to adapt."
Accountants
Accounting is generally viewed as a stable profession, but even employees in this industry could be at risk.
"Technology hasn't put everybody out of a job yet, but it does put some people out of a job," Brett Caraway, associate professor with the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto, said on Global News Radio 640 Toronto last week.
Caraway added that "intellectual labor" in particular could be threatened.
"This could be lawyers, accountants," he said. "It is something new, and it will be interesting to see just how disruptive and painful it is to employment and politics."
Customer service agents
You've probably already experienced calling or chatting with a company's customer service, and having a robot answer. ChatGPT and related technologies could continue this trend.
A 2022 study from the tech research company Gartner predicted that chatbots will be the main customer service channel for roughly 25% of companies by 2027.
How ChatGPT Will Destabilize White-Collar Work
No technology in modern memory has caused mass job loss among highly educated workers. Will generative AI be an exception?
In the next five years, it is likely that AI will begin to reduce employment for college-educated workers. As the technology continues to advance, it will be able to perform tasks that were previously thought to require a high level of education and skill. This could lead to a displacement of workers in certain industries, as companies look to cut costs by automating processes. While it is difficult to predict the exact extent of this trend, it is clear that AI will have a significant impact on the job market for college-educated workers. It will be important for individuals to stay up to date on the latest developments in AI and to consider how their skills and expertise can be leveraged in a world where machines are increasingly able to perform many tasks.
There you have it, I guess: ChatGPT is coming for my job and yours, according to ChatGPT itself. The artificially intelligent content creator, whose name is short for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” was released two months ago by OpenAI, one of the country’s most influential artificial-intelligence research laboratories. The technology is, put simply, amazing. It generated that first paragraph instantly, working with this prompt: “Write a five-sentence paragraph in the style of The Atlantic about whether AI will begin to reduce employment for college-educated workers in the next five years.”
ChatGPT is just one of many mind-blowing generative AI tools released recently, including the image generators Midjourney and DALL-E and the video generator Synthesia. The upside of these AI tools is easy to see: They’re going to produce a tremendous amount of digital content, quickly and cheaply. Students are already using ChatGPT to help them write essays. Businesses are using ChatGPT to create copy for their websites and promotional materials, and to respond to customer-service inquiries. Lawyers are using it to produce legal briefs (ChatGPT passes the torts and evidence sections of the Multistate Bar Examination, by the way) and academics to produce footnotes.
Yet an extraordinary downside is also easy to see: What happens when services like ChatGPT start putting copywriters, journalists, customer-service agents, paralegals, coders, and digital marketers out of a job? For years, tech thinkers have been warning that flexible, creative AI will be a threat to white-collar employment, as robots replace skilled office workers whose jobs were once considered immune to automation. In the most extreme iteration, analysts imagine AI altering the employment landscape permanently. One Oxford study estimates that 47 percent of U.S. jobs might be at risk.
No single technology in modern memory has caused mass job loss among highly educated workers. Will generative AI really be an exception? No one can answer this question, given how new the technology is and given how slowly employment can adjust in response to technological change. But AI really is different, technology experts told me—a range of tasks that up until now were impossible to automate are becoming automatable. “Before, progress was linear and predictable. You figured out the steps and the computer followed them. It followed the procedure; it didn’t learn and it didn’t improvise,” the MIT professor David Autor, one of the world’s foremost experts on employment and technological change, told me. ChatGPT and the like do improvise, promising to destabilize a lot of white-collar work, regardless of whether they eliminate jobs or not.
People and businesses are just figuring out how to use emerging AI technologies, let alone how to use them to create new products, streamline their business operations, and make employees more efficient. If history is any guide, this process could take longer than you might think. Consider electricity. The circuit, electric lights, and rudimentary electric motors were developed in the early 1800s. But another century passed before the widespread adoption of electricity in the United States began to lift GDP. Or take computers. They became commercially available in the early 1950s but did not show up in the productivity stats until the late 1990s.
Some technologies clearly improve productivity and reduce the need for labor. Automated machine tools, for instance, depress manufacturing employment while lifting output and productivity, as do many of the forms of machinery invented and employed since the Industrial Revolution. But other technologies—even amazing ones—show surprisingly muted effects. How about the internet, which has revolutionized almost every facet of communications in the past four decades? Despite altering how we date and talk and read and watch and vote and emote and record our own life stories, launching a zillion businesses, and creating however many fortunes, the internet “fails the hurdle test as a Great Invention,” the economist Robert Gordon argued in 2000, because it “provides information and entertainment more cheaply and conveniently than before, but much of its use involves substitution of existing activities from one medium to another.” Nearly a quarter century later, the internet still hasn’t spurred a productivity revolution. Smartphones haven’t either.
So is AI like the smartphone or is it like an automated machine tool? Is it about to change the way that work gets done without eliminating many jobs in aggregate, or is it about to turn San Francisco into the Rust Belt?
Predicting where technology will cause job losses is hard, Autor noted. Remember the freak-out several years ago over the possibility of self-driving automobiles eliminating work for truck drivers? But AI is much more flexible than a system like Excel, much more creative than a Google Doc. What’s more, AI systems get better and better and better as they get more use and absorb more data, whereas engineers often need to laboriously and painstakingly update other types of software.
As a rule, when companies can substitute machines for people, they will. AI can do work currently done by paralegals, copywriters, digital-content producers, executive assistants, entry-level computer programmers, and, yes, some journalists. That means such jobs might change, and soon. But even if ChatGPT can spit out a pretty good paragraph on AI, it can’t interview AI and labor experts, nor can it find historical documents, nor can it assess the quality of studies of technological change and employment. It creates content out of what is already out there, with no authority, no understanding, no ability to correct itself, no way to identify genuinely new or interesting ideas. That implies that AI might make original journalism more valuable and investigative journalists more productive, while creating an enormous profusion of simpler content. AI might spit out listicles and summaries of public meetings, while humans will write in-depth stories. “In many ways, AI will help people use expertise better,” Autor said. “It means that we’ll specialize more.”
Fred Benenson: AI is coming for your favorite menial tasks
AI could also make a wide variety of industries more efficient, with muted effects on overall employment. Matt Wampler is a co-founder of an AI-powered small business called ClearCOGS. He’s been a “restaurant guy” his whole career, he told me. Restaurants and grocery stores, he says, tend to run on thin margins, yet still tend to waste a considerable amount of food. People order more spaghetti than burgers; buns get thrown out. “Restaurants just lag behind on technology,” he told me. “They’re all about people. It’s people serving people; it’s people managing people. And in that very human-centric world, the default way of handling problems is to hand it to a person. Phil’s going to do it.”
ClearCOGS takes restaurants’ customer-order history, supply data, and labor data and uses AI-powered modeling to make their books leaner and more profitable. If people are starting to order more spaghetti than burgers, the system will prompt the chef or manager to buy more pasta and fewer rolls. “We put this in place in some of my cousin’s sandwich shops,” Wampler told me. “Simple answers to simple questions. The question they needed answered was, there’s an assistant manager on the night shift and a couple hours before close, he has to decide whether to bake another tray of bread or not. We provide that answer.” This use of ChatGPT isn’t eliminating human jobs, really; neighborhood sandwich joints aren’t hiring McKinsey consultants. But it might make food service more efficient as a whole.
Even if it doesn’t boost the economy, AI could still change the texture of our lives and alter how we spend our time, like social media did before it. Video games might become more immersive. Shops might have far better copywriting and sales visuals. Movies might look cooler. Videos in the depths of YouTube might become far weirder and more beautiful. We might also see far more formulaic content than we already do. (Much more ominously, there might be a huge amount of plausible-seeming disinformation online.)
For workers, Autor noted, the great risk is that AI technologies cause too sudden a change in what kind of labor employers want. Certain specializations might get wiped out, leaving thousands of call-center operators or marketing workers unemployed. But he stressed the benefits of having such technology in our hands. Productivity has languished for decades. Machines doing a little more work would have a big upside, after all.