Looking to the past, automation has been the grim reaper of countless job categories, like on production lines, and it's not showing any signs of slowing down. For example, self-checkout scanners have replaced a number of checkout counters in supermarkets that would have been run by actual staff. Even hotel reception staff are being replaced by automated machines. Automation is nothing new.
The problem the likes of AI text generators like ChatGPT are creating isn't just in existing jobs; it's that it replaces existing jobs while also disrupting existing industries in ways that affect the people who aren't employed in them yet. And one of its biggest targets is education.
Why education is being disrupted by ChatGPT
Education is already being disrupted by ChatGPT, and it's happening in two ways. The first is that students can use the tool to generate essays, analyze problems, and even write code for them. The second reason is why I think education will need to change as an industry, and that reason is that AI detection algorithms do not work and likely never can work.
When you use an AI text detector, you're feeding regular text into an algorithm that you trust will tell you if something is AI-generated or not. Given that the likes of ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Bing Chat are sometimes wrong, why would you blindly trust an algorithm to define whether a piece of text is written by a human or not? It's a lot of trust to put into something that has no outlined process, won't give explanations for its decisions, and merely gives an output of what some algorithm has decided the submitted text looks like.
Here's a fun fact: Most AI detection algorithms will flag the first paragraph of this article's section as being written with AI, but I didn't generate it with AI. The reason it gets flagged is that it's simple and easy to understand. I didn't use any linguistic flourishes; I wrote it concisely. I've noticed random paragraphs of mine in different articles will be flagged as written by AI (I can assure you they aren't), while others will say they are 100% written by humans.
So, if we've established that AI content detectors can't be trusted, then it's impossible to punish a student for using AI tools to write an essay if they so happen to fall foul of an inaccurate detection algorithm. In turn, this means that students that actually do use AI generation to write essays or submit other content also cannot be caught. There is no silver bullet, and there isn't a whole lot that can be done sans changing how the entire education industry evaluates student performance.
Other industries are at risk too
Education isn't the only industry at risk, but it's certainly going to have one of the more disastrous outcomes of the proliferation of AI. Other affected industries include art and news reporting. The Associated Press has famously used AI for nearly a decade for its corporate earnings and putting together sports scores. Since then, other sites like CNET have used AI to generate articles that shared blatantly wrong information and even plagiarized. It's hard to find an argument that suggests these industries will all come out the end of it completely unscathed.
There are going to be huge ramifications across multiple industries, and there isn't much we can do to prepare for it.
Where it gets even weirder is with the forums and chatbots companies run. If you've ever spoken to a customer service agent from, say, an ISP, you'll know how frustrating an experience it can be just waiting for someone to get back to you, so AI chatbots can fill in the gaps. Plus, while ChatGPT (or any equivalent GPT-4 model) won't be 100% accurate, customer service agents aren't, either. However, companies will need to use more computational power to run those bots, increasing the need for data centers and more on-site engineers to manage them, but decreasing the number of support agent jobs.
There are a lot of question marks surrounding multiple industries right now thanks to AI, and some will come out of it better than others. AI won't replace every job, but it will have some kind of impact on every type of job that you can think of. There are going to be huge ramifications across multiple industries, and there isn't much we can do to prepare for it.
