Marketing and Social Media Professionals Already Hit By AI Induced Job Cuts, Others to Follow
Pranshu Verma and Gerrit De Vynck of the Washington Post report that while technology used too automate dirt and repetitive jobs, AI chatbots are coming after high-paid jobs.
Some workers are already being hit.
“Those who write marketing and social media content are in the first wave of people being replaced with tools such as chatbots, which are seemingly able to produce plausible alternatives to their work.
Experts say that even advanced AI doesn’t match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality.”
Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, shared told the Post
“In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs. This time, the automation threat is aimed squarely at the highest-earning, most creative jobs that … require the most educational background.”
Mollick shares it’s too early to predict the extent of the hit.
“…jobs such as copywriting, document translation and transcription, and paralegal work are particularly at risk, because they include tasks that are easily done by chatbots. High-level legal analysis, creative writing or art may not be as easily replaceable, he said, because humans still outperform AI in those areas.”
Content writers, of which we have many in legal, may quell take a hit.
The Post reports on one who’s been all but wiped out.
“Eric Fein ran his content-writing business for 10 years, charging $60 an hour to write everything from 150-word descriptions of bath mats to website copy for cannabis companies. The 34-year-old from Bloomingdale, Ill., built a steady business with 10 ongoing contracts, which made up half of his annual income and provided a comfortable life for his wife and 2-year-old son.
But in March, Fein received a note from his largest client: His services would no longer be needed because the company would be transitioning to ChatGPT. One by one, Fein’s nine other contracts were canceled for the same reason. His entire copywriting business was gone nearly overnight.”
No question employers have had their challenges with some decreased quality from ChatGPT but as Olivia Lipkin, a 25 year old content writer from San Francisco says “I’m totally taking a break from the office world, people are looking for the cheapest solution, and that’s not a person — that’s a robot.”
Got to wonder where we are heading in the legal industry – in marketing, in communications and in lawyering itself.