For years, artificial intelligence has helped automate work previously performed by people. From simple tasks, like transcribing audio, to more complex tasks, like summarizing thousands of legal documents, AI is helping make many of our jobs less tedious and complicated. AI advances like DALL-E mini and ChatGPT—the free AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that’s gone viral in recent weeks—could speed up that automation.
As AI technology becomes better and more advanced, the question in many of our minds is whether “robots” could replace us at work. ChatGPT is no exception. Some people were so awestruck by its capabilities, they declared that jobs like customer support and programming could very well become obsolete in a few years. Even academics were impressed by the bot’s essay-writing skills.
Does that mean that some of us should worry and start thinking about new careers? Not just yet. The technology has its limitations and lacks many qualities required to produce meaningful results. But, while most jobs remain safe for now, watching the trends can help us prepare for a future where AI bots could change how we work.
What is an AI chatbot?
You may not realize it, but you’ve already interacted with various AI chatbots online. These bots can help you do anything from finding information on a company’s website and choosing a new pair of shoes to taking your pizza order.
An AI chatbot is an automated program that uses natural language processing or natural language understanding, along with machine learning (all branches of AI) to interact with humans via text, speech, or both. These conversational bots are designed to understand both the context and the intent of a question or statement and respond based on the data they have.
By automating various aspects, chatbots bring benefits such as:
- Scalability: Unlike humans, chatbots are great at multitasking and can engage with many customers at the same time.
- 24/7 availability: They can work around the clock without needing to stop for rest or sleep.
- Huge processing power: They can process massive quantities of data faster than any human, solving problems and responding to customer inquiries within seconds.
Although AI chatbots are a great automation tool, they still rely on human programmers. That means they only know what they’re taught, and the resulting bias and lack of contextual awareness could lead to a negative customer experience.
How AI chatbots could impact jobs
While AI chatbots have been around for some time, ChatGPT grew wildly popular after OpenAI (the same company that developed the DALL-E) made the chat research tool available for free. One million users signed up to try it within the first five days. Even Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI recently, prompting speculation that ChatGPT could help the tech giant increase market share for its search engine, Bing.
Some people who’ve tried the app described its capabilities as stunning and mind-blowing. Perhaps the most exciting part is that ChatGPT could make automating interactions and certain tasks easier, faster, and more accessible. But it’s not likely to replace jobs wholly—rather, it could make some parts of jobs easier for humans.
Here are some examples:
- Marketing: ChatGPT is good at writing high-level content based on information harvested from the internet, and it can even refuse a query based on a false premise. But it can’t fact-check or understand nuances, empathize with the audience, and so on. So perhaps marketers could instead use the tool for generating ideas and writing entry-level content.
- Programming: The app can fix broken code, which could eliminate this tedious task for programmers. However, it can’t replace programmers altogether because we still need humans to create, among other things, the very models used by AI. Also, ChatGPT requires many code examples to be trained, and some companies won’t be okay with having their codebase appear in a public database, even if it’s anonymous.
- Education: One area where the bot shines is in explaining complex concepts, which could make it ideal for teaching. But the job of college professor is safe—ChatGPT is often inaccurate and can’t separate fact from fiction. And, like other similar programs before it, sometimes the chatbot spews complete nonsense. Still, the app could be a great tool for automating some teaching tasks, such as writing a lesson on an entry-level concept, as long as the instructor checks the final work.
ChatGPT could make just about any job easier by doing things like summarizing information, translating content, and generating generic answers to often-asked questions. And, of course, we’ll see more advances, improving not only this chatbot but others, too—and creating new use cases.
ChatGPT may not replace jobs, but we do expect to see more jobs relying on AI chatbots like this one in the future. If this means humans no longer have to do monotonous or boring work, why not?
Want to learn what else AI bots can do?
Read about the DALL-E and its ability to create realistic images from prompts.
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