The world of artificial intelligence (AI) is ever-growing. With ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, and other AI chatbots making headlines every day, it does make one question themselves- to what extent do we need the AI-aided tools, and why are we depending on them just now? Work used to happen even before the advent of AI, so why is it now that people are engrossed in incorporating this technology?
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AI and the Job Market
One of the most prominent contentions in the area lies with the fact that what would happen to the job market? Is it really going to slash jobs or create more opportunities? To a certain level, it is beyond doubt that AI is more efficient than humans. According to a report by Forbes, there are three industries that stand to be heavily impacted. These are finance and banking, media and marketing, and legal services. One can make out that management in the banking sector is a huge task, and machines stand to do it more efficiently. News writing is a core essence of the media sector, and again, AI-aided tools can do that task far more efficiently and effortlessly. When it comes to legal services, have you wondered how much time it takes to perfect writing a legal paper? Well, these tools are here to make “lives easier.”
As per the data from Challenger, Grey, & Christmas, AI is responsible for nearly 4,000 job losses in May 2023. This is because of the ever-growing and revolutionising ability of technology to perform advanced organisational tasks while intensifying the drop in workloads. Now, to understand this more concretely, imagine you are part of a newsroom. You are supposed to write reports, and you work at the desk. With an AI tool like ChatGPT, it’ll take a few moments to write a report. So, the job that required an entire team would now require just one or two people with the AI tool.
But it is not all black. While a variety of jobs can be seen getting eliminated, there is another line of work that is getting created. However, it is mostly in the service sector concerning information and technology (IT).
Good, Bad, and Ugly: AI as an Intern
However, let’s take a minute and concentrate on AI. And please feel free to look at yourself as an intern. Both of these work as per the commands of the boss. They’ll produce the work according to the “vision of the superior.” Moreover, both of them can work efficiently because one is aided by AI and the other by the drive for employment. Can you draw the parallels clearly now? The AI tool functions as a good intern—efficiently and effortlessly. But where does one start drawing a line?
A professor from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Ethan Mollick, expressed that AI tools can be “good for a lot of things,” though AI has a tendency to make factual errors. The professor further expressed that it is not different from humans, specifically those who just enter the job market. Recently, Sanjeev Bikchandani, the Co-founder of Info Edge, expressed that “AI is like a productivity tool. AI is perhaps like a very good-quality intern.” One can clearly observe that the world is gradually inclining towards AI, but is it really that good as it is being played out?
We asked ChatGPT to write a piece while pretending to be an economist on the impact of the global recession in the post-pandemic period on India. It did great work since it drew its analysis from the facts it had been fed. However, one can make out the errors as the AI tool tries to go beyond September 2021 and fails to do so. There is no data available with ChatGPT post this period, and “Browse with Bing” has been disabled.
If we emphasise the short run, we can clearly make it out that humans still hold the advantage of carrying more knowledge than the AI tool, but one never knows what the future holds, for it could start picking up real-time data, and it is beyond a layman’s imagination to think that it can pick up data without being fed. Nevertheless, there is still one point where AI might lack for a very long time.
If we say the AI tool is capable of writing a news report, as far as facts are concerned, it can do a great job, but when it comes to the “sensitivity factor” or the “emotional capacity.” It’ll lack what humans are capable of. We can’t expect an AI tool to write a physical harassment story from the human angle that journalists are often seen doing.
Who is the Best Intern?
Human capabilities are more varied. Humans have the capacity to envision, anticipate, feel, and judge changing conditions, which enables people to transition from short-term to long-term concerns, in contrast to AI abilities that are simply responsive to the facts provided. These skills are specific to humans and unlike artificial intelligence, which depends on a constant stream of data from outside the body to function.
But it’s not just about humans having that emotional quotient. There is also a question of ethics with AI. One part of it lies in the fact that these chatbots can impersonate people, produce answers for any test, and often spread misinformation. The other part of it lies in the question of privacy.
When we talk about chatbots like ChatGPT, these chatbots are fed data according to which they produce results. Now, if you wrote a piece years ago online, it is completely possible that the piece is being fed to the chatbot. Google recently updated its privacy policy, according to which the tech giant can scrape everything that is available online for AI. In a way, it is almost as if Google owns everything that belongs to you and me.
So while there is one side of AI that dictates it to be a “good intern,” it is way behind in becoming the best intern in the room.
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