Hello, this is Hayashi from the Marketing Department.
ChatGPT is on a roll, and continues to make headlines with the release of its latest version, GPT-4 in March 2023.
On the other hand, in the past few years, there have been whispers of AI unemployment, and jobs that will disappear as a result of such AI advances are often discussed.
As I wrote in a previous blog, I have a certain sense of crisis about this current situation from my perspective as a writer.
In this paper, I would like to consider AI unemployment, coexistence with AI, and how to utilize AI in business, using my own familiar job as a writer as a subject matter.
What jobs are (or are said to be) disappearing with the rise of AI?
In 2013, Michael Osborne, an associate professor at Oxford University in the U.K. and his colleagues published a paper indicating that;
- 47% of U.S. workers are at risk of losing their jobs in 10 or 20 years.
In 2014, Larry Page, then CEO of Google, and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, also spoke about the impact of technology on human jobs. Add to these trends the recent advances and practical application of AI, and it can be said that AI unemployment is now a real term that is being whispered about.
Under such circumstances, various media and people have predicted jobs that will disappear due to advances in AI. Of these jobs, those such as cashiers at convenience stores and supermarkets, train drivers, and call center operators are the ones that are most likely to be automated.
Other predictions include the commercialization of security robots and the decrease in cash transactions, which will affect the work of security guards and bank employees. Other jobs that are predicted to be taken over by machines include office workers, construction workers, cleaners, parcel delivery workers, and many others.
So what about the work of writers?
Especially after ChatGPT’s debut, there have been whispers about the possibility of AI unemployment in the writing profession. Not only ChatGPT, but other AI-based writing tools are already in use in the business world, and some newspapers and news agencies have begun to use such tools for their articles.
There are many different types of writers. Typical examples are interview writers who conduct interviews and write articles, copywriters who create advertisements, web writers who create text for the Web, and technical writers who create specialized text for instruction manuals and other documents.
I have experience as an interview writer, copywriter, and web writer, and I would like to consider what AI could be used for in each of these writing jobs.
Can AI do Interviews?
First of all, the most important part of an interview writer’s job is, of course, the interview. Hmmm, this seems like a difficult task to be left to AI alone, doesn’t it? However, at the 2018 Winter Olympics held in Pyeongchang, South Korea, an attempt was made to have AI create and distribute breaking news on competition results. There are also examples such as JX News Agency’s FASTALERT, which has AI collect and analyze information on disasters, accidents, incidents, etc. from SNS and distribute it as news.
More than 15 years ago, I was working as a news editor for a mobile site. My job was to select articles for the site from the many news items distributed by news agencies, create catchy headlines, and arrange the topics on the top page of the site. I also created and distributed news bulletins when there were results of high-profile sports games or obituaries of celebrities.
This is exactly the kind of work that AI can now perform.
Is ad copy AI’s forte?
Copywriters, on the other hand, usually create advertisements by incorporating keywords such as product or service features.
For example,
- Producing sentences based on keywords
is where AI excels. Today, many novels and blogs are being created using text generation tools such as ChatGPT.
Humans will not be able to match the speed of AI, especially in cases such as EC sites and catalogs, where a large amount of ad copy is required for each product. Also, if it becomes as good as ChatGPT-4, it may be able to create advanced copywriting such as corporate PR. At the very least, ChatGPT could provide some useful ideas for copywriting.
When I was a copywriter, I often had to increase or decrease the number of words in a piece of text once it was created to match the space available for publication. Such rewrites can amount to an enormous amount of work when creating e-commerce sites and catalogs, requiring a great deal of time and effort on the part of the writer. Such work can be made dramatically more efficient by making better use of AI.
Also, I have no experience as a technical writer, but creating instruction manuals and specifications from specifications and other necessary data is another area where AI excels.
What Work Must Be Done by Human Beings?
Looking at it this way, it seems to me that most of the writer’s work can be replaced by AI. So, on the other hand, what are the tasks of writers that need to be done by humans?
If you are an interview writer, ChatGPT seems to be able to dig deeper into a story to some extent by repeatedly asking questions. However, the work of listening to a deeper story while sensing and empathizing with the feelings of the other person may currently only be possible by human beings.
I think this explains why counselors and medical/welfare-related jobs are said not to disappear even with advances in AI.
In the case of a copywriter, it is the human who decides the concept and direction of the advertisement. Conversely, however, it is possible for an AI to proceed with the rest as long as a human decides the direction. In other words, the director and AI will be able to produce advertisements, and writers will no longer be needed…
AI Replaces Tasks, Not Professions
Well, that aside, every job has various aspects, and there are parts that can be left to AI and parts that cannot. There have been some arguments against simply assuming unemployment will be caused by advances in AI, and some have suggested that such matters should be considered on a task basis, rather than by occupation.
The most famous of these is a study published by Melanie Arntz and her colleagues at the ZEW Research Institute in Germany, who pointed out that jobs themselves are not being replaced by machines, but only some of their tasks.
As already mentioned, a study by Oxford University in the U.K. reported that 47% of the workforce in the U.S. is at high risk of being replaced by machines within 10 to 20 years. However, a 2016 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), based on the task-based theory of Arntz and colleagues, reported that an average of 9% of occupations in 21 OECD countries have a greater than 70% chance of being automated. Although there are differences in terms of conditions, 47% and 9% are quite a different impression.
Questetra BPM Suite as a Means to Coexist with AI
Now, looking at the above-mentioned task-based discussion, at the current stage, the question is ultimately,
- What part of the business should be entrusted to AI?
And how should we incorporate AI processing into the operation? It’s important to think about that.
What is useful here is software called workflow systems or BPM tools that enable visualization and verification of business processes by means of diagrams.
Questetra BPM Suite is a BPM tool that allows you to easily create a business flow diagram on your PC using the mouse, and to automatically progress your business along the created flow diagram. Of course, it is also possible to incorporate task processing by AI and RPA tools into the automated business process. In the second part of this article, we will introduce the flow of incorporating AI task processing into business processes with Questetra BPM Suite.
If you are interested in this software, please try the free trial and experience the visualization and automation of your business with Questetra BPM Suite. You can start using it right away.
(Continued in Part 2)
