As long as machines have been invented, their adoption has made skilled workers obsolete. If you’re one such worker perhaps you’ve thought about retraining yourself for the information economy.
Let me save you some time – don’t bother. Computers are taking all our jobs.
ChatGPT is here
So much has been written about ChatGPT – the latest AI that has really taken the world by storm – that I had to reopen our investigation into AI tools that might help the technology marketer. Are we finally to the point where an AI can automatically create decent content? The answer is – yes.
I asked it to write blogs about EV infrastructure and V2X. And the result was amazing. Not perfect, but pretty damn good. I’m not going to bore you with the actual dialog I’ve had with ChatGPT (it’s available through download links at the top and bottom of this blog). I double-checked most of the numbers it states because it sometimes gets those wrong, and it isn’t a terribly provocative or interesting read. But it’s far above the output of GPT2 or even GPT3 – for the most part, it’s writing solid, sensible copy.
ChatGPT versus content writers
So, should you use ChatGPT instead of a human writer? I’d say it depends on what you need. I think ChatGPT produces remarkable content for an AI, and as long as you’re willing to do a quick fact check, some of the content it creates is directly usable. A lot of companies rely on their marketing to regularly churn out content, and this it can do.
It can’t do everything yet. Based on our experiments, it’s unlikely to be able to delve deep into niche topics – those areas probably don’t (or can’t) have enough training data. Nor is it adding new thoughts or opinions to a topic. But quite honestly, humans are the exact same – we mostly just regurgitate and reassemble repeated ideas. ChatGPT is a bit “stale” in that the model is trained from data in 2021. That is, it doesn’t know about anything within the last year that’s happened.
Really, these are all minor quibbles.
It’s just a matter of time before all information-based jobs are severely threatened by AI tools.
ChatGPT as an aide
I think the first step – one that’s already happening – is that people will use ChatGPT as an aide to their content writing. They may use it as a starting point for their work, as a way to come up with a different perspective, or a way to break a writer’s block. We’ve already used it somewhat experimentally that way. And the more that people have exposure to what it does and can do, the more people will come to see it as another resource. (It will be very interesting to see how long ChatGPT remains a free service, once people start depending on it.)
ChatGPT and marketing
With people using ChatGPT to spew out blogs, what happens to content marketing? With an explosion of new and mostly good quality content generated by ChatGPT and similar knockoffs, I predict that it’s going to become a lot harder to run a successful content marketing campaign. SEO as a discipline will need to change. So will how people find information and how they know if it’s trustworthy.
I don’t know where it’s all going, but know that the field of marketing is about to take a drastic change.
Whose job is next?
One thing that seems clear is that ChatGPT will become a major threat to blog writers around the world. Thankfully, Nancy and I work on a lot more than blogs – we do a full suite of technology marketing activities.
Given how quickly generative models have exploded in capability, it’s just a matter of time before all information-based jobs – programmers, marketers, lawyers, data analysts, IT – are severely threatened by AI tools. Just as has happened many times in the history of inventions, humans are going to need to redefine where and what they’re valuable for.
ChatGPT, DALL-E, and a host of other AIs are showing that we are on the precipice of computers replacing nearly every information worker’s job. While I predict it will be three years before this starts happening in earnest everywhere, that’s conservative – it might be even less. Society is going to have to rethink how economics works, and if you haven’t started worrying about this, you probably should.
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