AI Job Replacement Spreads... Marketing and Content Industries
Previously Focused on Blue-Collar Jobs, but Trend is Changing
"Directly Targeting High-Education, High-Income Creative Work"
Concerns about job displacement due to artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming a reality even among high-paying knowledge workers, according to an analysis.
On the 2nd (local time), the Washington Post (WP) reported, "ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners," introducing cases of job losses in some white-collar (office and administrative) professions caused by the generative AI 'ChatGPT.'
The professions WP focused on were marketing and social media (SNS) content sectors. Eric Payne (34), who lives in Illinois, USA, quit his advertising copywriting job that he had done for the past 10 years. He had stable contracts with about 10 companies, writing everything from bathroom mat ads to corporate website introductions, but since March, his workload began to dry up.
Payne said ChatGPT cut off his "lifeline." The biggest client cited the reason for contract termination as their policy to "do copywriting through ChatGPT from now on." The other nine clients gave the same reason. He is currently attending a technical school to become a plumber.
Olivia Lipkin (25), a copywriter in San Francisco and the sole copywriter at a tech startup, saw her workload gradually decrease after ChatGPT's launch and was laid off in April. Lipkin said, "Every time people mentioned ChatGPT, I was engulfed by anxiety that it would eventually replace me, and in the end, I lost my job because of AI."
Recently, in American society, concerns about unemployment have grown as demand for white-collar labor decreases due to AI advancements and other reasons. Traditionally, such concerns were the domain of blue-collar (field workers) affected by factory automation, but the generative AI boom has changed this trend.
Goldman Sachs, a US investment bank (IB), estimated in a report released in March that 18% of jobs worldwide could be replaced by generative AI, with white-collar jobs being the most threatened. Conversely, it stated, "Jobs that spend a significant portion of working hours outdoors or involve physical labor are difficult to automate with AI."
Professor Lee Sun Molik of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania explained, "In the past, the threat of automation hit hard, dirty, and repetitive tasks, but now this threat is directly targeting the creative work of highly educated and high-income groups."
'Accepting Quality Degradation to Replace with AI... Problems Also Occur'
It is still difficult to say that AI has fully reached human levels in creative tasks such as writing. However, WP reported that many companies are adopting AI and laying off workers while accepting some 'quality degradation' to reduce costs.
The companies that notified Payne of contract termination reportedly made this decision to cut costs despite knowing that the accuracy and originality of ChatGPT's output would be lower. Only one out of ten companies that were dissatisfied with the copy generated by ChatGPT returned to Payne.
However, there have also been cases where companies that replaced workers' tasks with AI encountered problems. The US tech media CNET released 77 articles written by AI but stopped using AI after factual errors were found. Recently, a US lawyer submitted case law found through ChatGPT to the court, which turned out to be entirely fake, causing controversy.
Sarah Roberts, a digital labor researcher and professor at UCLA, pointed out, "The costs companies have to pay due to chatbot errors may actually increase," and criticized, "Companies rushing to adopt AI are making hasty decisions."
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