Will ChatGPT and Other AI Replace My Job?

Instead of being lured into panic, as the media headlines would have us do, we decided to ask good old ChatGPT to see if it was planning on taking our jobs away from us. It makes sense for us to pose this question, as writing is one of the jobs that AI is purportedly endangering.

Alas, we went straight to the horse’s mouth and posed the question about the future of AI and whether it was going to replace us. We’re happy to report it said, “Overall, it is unlikely that I will replace your job, but I can help you work more efficiently and effectively in your role.” Phew, what a load off.

ChatGPT and its AI ilk are taking the world by storm right now. Everyone is talking about them. We didn’t even need to finish the search query in Google. As we started to type “Will ChatGPT,” Google auto-filled the rest: “take my job.” In all seriousness, there are indeed certain industries that will be affected. It’s really a matter of when, not if. The majority of us already use some form of AI in our day-to-day lives, with nary a second thought (think: Siri or Alexa, or even a simple Google search).

According to a March 2023 report by researchers at Princeton, NYU and UPenn1, any job where generating forms and documents is a big part of the duties — such as insurance agents, real estate brokers, and law clerks — has the potential to be most affected. However, if you believe the positive thinkers, it will only serve to make those jobs easier, not replace them altogether. The internet itself changed many of these industries already. This is in many ways an extension of the changes that have been happening in the last 25 years. A very sunny prediction from financial giant Goldman Sachs2 recently stated that predictive AI tech has the potential to raise the global GDP by 7 percent. OK, we’re listening.

When you consider that 60 percent of current jobs did not exist in 1940, you realize that changes to the way we work is a true constant. We’ve identified the five sectors that could possibly see changes due to ChatGPT and other language-modeling AI interfaces like it.

Sector 1: Law

According to the Goldman Sachs report, legal jobs could be heavily affected by AI tech, but not necessarily in a bad way. Language modeling programs like ChatGPT will serve to mostly enhance, not replace, legal staff. Law professor Andrew Perlman experimented with ChatGPT for an article he wrote for Harvard Law Review3 and even asked it directly how it could help lawyers in their daily tasks. The four areas of legal work it thought it could help with are legal research, document generation, legal information, and legal analysis. And it’s right.

All of those tasks are very time-consuming for legal workers, and with ChatGPT’s more than 750 billion internal prompts, they could be done in minutes, not hours, or even days or weeks sometimes, depending on the complexity of the case.

Another positive legal consideration is the ability to help larger communities of people. According to World Justice Project,4 90 percent of impoverished Americans and over half of middle-income Americans don’t get the proper civil legal representation they need due to the high cost. The proliferation of AI tech, and its cost-lowering possibilities, has the ability to help underrepresented people with issues such as debt collection, child support, foreclosure, and eviction.

Sector 2: Computer Coding

AI tech taking away tech jobs is an intriguing concept. But this is another area where AI can be used to enhance, not eradicate. While ChatGPT can be used to write code, early testing has shown that it’s not good at writing complex code. It is, however, good at checking large amounts of code for bugs and errors, which no coder wants to spend their time doing.

On another bright side, a new job type has actually been created in the tech sector: prompt engineering. This job entails a human learning to design the best possible prompts for ChatGPT so that it gives the most useful output. This job description is popping up more and more, and there are courses and certifications for it.

Sector 3: Online Content Creation

From writers to social media creators, the online content creation sector is a large one and getting larger. While some aspects of content writing could be replaced, it will most likely be the tasks that are the most mundane.

For example, if you’re an Etsy store owner, ChatGPT has a plug-in that will write all your product descriptions, titles, keywords, etc. As any online shop owner knows, this is a time-consuming and monotonous aspect of the job. If a language modeling program can do this for you, and do it well, this will allow you to post way more products for sale and will free up your time to do the creating that you love to do.

Sector 4: Finance

One of ChatGPT’s most impressive functions is its ability to crunch numbers fast. When you consider how many entry-level finance jobs involve Excel modeling and research, there is a strong chance AI tech could do a lot of that. However, that just means those people could focus on higher-value tasks.

Sector 5: Customer Service and Telemarketing

You may have seen AI tech at work when “live chatting” with customer service online. You may have also noticed their answers are limited and sometimes not helpful. You may have also received an automated telephone call telling you about clean energy upgrades or solar panels for your home. These things will give you a glimpse into ways AI can integrate into both customer service and telemarketing.

But many customer service issues are nuanced, and while you can get basic answers to questions with AI, we all know sometimes you really need to talk to a human. So while using AI to answer the basics might work, predictive AI can only go so far at this point. Early testing at Amazon showed answers to be incorrect at times, so no need to worry at this point that entire customer service teams will be replaced by machines.

Final Thoughts

The answer to our initial question is … probably not.

ChatGPT will not take your job, at least not now. It could, however, vastly change the way you do your job and help you with some of the more tedious, monotonous things you do every day. Further, it may actually boost overall productivity and growth in your industry. This isn’t to say the outlook is 100 percent rosy when it comes to threats from AI and its integration into our human world. However, for now, your employment is safe.

And hey, if telemarketers become robots on the other end of your phone, you will feel way less guilty hanging up on them. Win-win.