OpenAI CTO Admits Creative Jobs Can Be Harmed By AI
When ChatGPT went live, a wave of worry hit the creative community as many saw the advent of AI bringing risk to their careers. Now in a new interview, the chief technology officer of OpenAI, Mira Murati, recently voiced concerns that AI could indeed cause job displacement in the creative industry.
But, and this “but” may upset some, she questions whether those jobs were truly necessary in the first place. “Some creative jobs maybe will go away,” Mira Murati told the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth University in an interview. “But maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
While Murati did not specify which creative jobs might be at risk, her comments came amid ongoing discussions about the entertainment industry and how AI will change it. Currently, the sector has faced significant backlash, with screenwriters and actors striking in 2023, in part, over the use of AI in Hollywood.
Freelancers have also felt the impact of AI encroaching on their work. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the number of freelance jobs posted on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr has dropped by as much as 21% since the introduction of ChatGPT and similar technologies.
Despite these concerns, Murati sees AI tools as a means to enhance creativity. “I really believe that using it as a tool for education, creativity, will expand our intelligence and creativity and imagination,” she says. “The first step is to actually help people understand what these systems are capable of, what they can do, integrate them into their workflows, and then start predicting and forecasting the impact.”
While Mira Murati acknowledges that AI is likely to lead to job displacement, she is uncertain about the extent of its impact. She believes AI will also create new opportunities. “I’m not an economist, but I certainly anticipate that a lot of jobs will change. Some jobs will be lost, some jobs will be gained,” she notes.
Jobs most at risk are those that are “strictly repetitive,” and not advancing creativity or problem-solving. This is a similar view taken by a recent IMF report on labor and jobs, and the effect of AI in the future, which raised some alarms of the negative impact of the technology.
As you can imagine, this has been on the minds of many in tech. For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also addressed job displacement due to AI. “A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s only going to be good; it’s only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced,” Altman told The Atlantic in July 2023. “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”
Other AI-focused executives echo these sentiments. Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, highlights a statistic from the University of Pennsylvania indicating that 49% of workers could have half or more of their tasks exposed to large language models like ChatGPT. Such a high rate, along with major shifts in job requirements, could put jobs at risk and necessitate reskilling.
“If all these jobs become a lot more vulnerable, then everybody’s in the reskilling world,” Maggioncalda previously told Fortune. “If you don’t know how to use AI for your job, you’re in trouble. All employers want you to be able to use this if you’ve graduated.”
Originally posted on OpenDataScience.com
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