ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence: Threat or opportunity for jobs?

By Alexander Chiejina

The wave of emerging technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI) tools and apps has continued to be on the upward trend, revolutionising several aspects of human lives. This development has generated concerns on potential risks and opportunities that these new technologies offer.

Recently, OpenAI, an AI research and development company, introduced ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which is trained to answer queries. The new AI tool interacts in a conversational way once given a detailed prompt, admits mistakes, and even rejects inappropriate requests. It can tell stories, and write codes.

There are concerns that this new AI tool could potentially take over certain roles traditionally held by humans, such as copywriting, answering customer service inquiries, writing news reports, and creating legal documents. As AI continues to improve, more jobs have been under the spotlight in the wake to increased automation.

Here are some jobs that will be hugely impacted or replaced completely by ChatGPT.

• Copywriting 

Professionals who write text for marketing campaigns, advertisements, and social media are in for a ride as this new chatbot can write essays, create opinion pieces, and even refute incorrect claims. It writes poetry, answers questions, and can even admit when it is wrong and self-correct. Basically, it is a content creator’s nightmare. Chandana Bala, an editor and member of Global Insight Advisory, explained that how content will evolve along with intelligent AI is that creativity, work history, specialisation, professionalism, and the ability to work well with others can work in a writer’s favour.

“ ‘How-To’ contents such as telling people how to use it, hack it, and beat their competition will soar [and] one way to stay relevant is to learn what copywriting chatbots can and cannot do and help businesses, startups, and individuals, use this emerging technology to grow their brands,” Bala added.

Arun Iyer, founder and creative partner, Spring Marketing Capital, believes that any good technology aids the process instead of replacing it.

According to Iyer, “As long as we stay invested in ideas that ‘no one else can do’ and we stay strong to our cultural roots, copywriters and ChatGPT can win the world together. ChatGPT is an extremely useful tool, but you still need human intelligence to feed the right input and to judge the output. It doesn’t understand the nuance of many things. A lot of times your job is to contextualise what is right? It’s not just sitting and writing a tonne of words around it.”

• Client Support 

ChatGPT cannot only provide support to customers through emails and messages but also give that empathetic help that makes the client feel like they are interfacing with a real person. ChatGPT has the potential to provide automated responses to common customer inquiries, generate answers to a specific question or provide a conversation flow with the customer. The technology that powers ChatGPT is already being used by firms like Meta, Canva, and Shopify in their customer support chatbots. Some of the benefits of using ChatGPT in customer service includes:

Automation – Automating the handling of common customer inquiries, allowing customer service representatives to focus on more complex or urgent issues.

4/7 availability – Providing quick and accurate responses to customer inquiries at all times, even outside of regular business hours.

Consistency – Providing consistent and accurate responses to customer inquiries, reducing the likelihood of miscommunication or errors.

Scalability –  Ability to handle a large number of customer inquiries simultaneously, allowing customer service operations to handle a larger volume of traffic.

Summaries – Efficiently summarise long customer interactions into manageable outcomes which assist customer service representatives to quickly understand the main issues and concerns of customers.

Despite the enormous benefit that it offers, experts caution that businesses should be aware of generative AI’s originality and unpredictability. The use of ChatGPT in customer service presents a number of ethical considerations that must be carefully evaluated and addressed by companies and policymakers in order to ensure that the benefits of the technology are realised while minimising potential negative impacts.

“One of the main concerns is that ChatGPT may collect, process, and store large amounts of personal data from customers, which could be vulnerable to data breaches or cyberattacks. This data may include personal information such as name, address, and contact details, as well as sensitive information such as financial or medical information,” Charles Kergaravat, CMO, Apizee stated.

To address these concerns, companies must implement robust data security measures to protect this data from unauthorised access, use, or disclosure. This may include measures such as encryption, secure data storage, and access controls to ensure that only authorised personnel have access to the data.

Kergaravat added that, “Companies must also comply with relevant data privacy laws and regulations. Compliance with these laws involves implementing appropriate data protection measures and providing customers with clear and transparent information about how their data is collected, used, and shared. It is also important to have a clear data retention and deletion policy, and to ensure that the data is deleted once it is no longer needed. Data privacy and security is a critical aspect of using ChatGPT for customer service and companies must take appropriate measures to protect the personal and sensitive data of customers to ensure compliance with data protection laws and regulations, and to maintain the trust of customers.”

• Cybersecurity

AI is a promising technology to help develop advanced cybersecurity products. Many believe broader use of AI and machine learning are critical to identifying potential threats more quickly. ChatGPT could play a crucial role in detecting and responding to cyberattacks and improving communication within the organisation during such times. It could also be used for bug bounty programnes. But where there is technology, there are cyber-risks, which must not be overlooked.

Ketaki Borade, senior market research analyst, Omdia, stated that writing phishing emails may become easier, without any of the typos or unique formats that today are often critical to differentiate these attacks from legitimate emails.

“The scary part is it is possible [it] can add as many variations to the prompt, such as “making the email look urgent,” “email with a high likelihood of recipients clicking on the link,” “social engineering email requesting wire transfer,” Borade explained.

Considering there are already criminal groups offering malware-as-a-service, with the assistance of an AI programme such as ChatGPT, it may soon become quicker and easier for attackers to launch cyberattacks with the help of AI-generated code. ChatGPT has given the power to even less experienced attackers to be able to write a more accurate malware code, which previously could only be done by experts.

These recent advances in AI will surely usher in a period of hardship and economic pain for some whose jobs are directly impacted and who find it hard to adapt — what economists euphemistically call, “adjustment costs.”

However, the genie is not going back into the bottle. The forward march of technology will continue, according to Ajay Agrawal, founder of Metaverse Mind Lab; Joshua Gans, chief economist at the Creative Destruction Lab and Avi Goldfarb, chief data scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab