How To Deal With AI as a Professional and as Business Owner.
January 16th, 2023
Last Updated on January 16th, 2023
This text was fully written by humans.
SUMMARY / KEY TAKEAWAYS
In recent months, multiple new algorithms led to the fast development in text-to-image solutions, as well as automated text and code generation.
This made millions of white-collar professionals — from artists, through content creators, to software developers — wonder about their future in the job market.
In this article, we approach the following questions: who should be worried and why? Who will gain the most from the AI revolution that we are all witnessing at the moment? Who will need to retrain and start their career anew, and whose career will accelerate? And, is anyone able to catch up in the first place?
Table of Contents
- Recent Progress in AI and Machine Will Make a Difference to Every Professional and Business
- The Biggest Beneficiary of the AI Revolution
- The Biggest Victim of the AI Revolution
- How To Deal With AI as a Professional
- How To Deal With AI as a Business Owner
- Conclusion: How To Deal with AI in Today’s Job Market?
Recent Progress in AI and Machine Will Make a Difference to Every Professional and Business.
As reviewed in our recent article entitled “Galloping Progress in AI and Machine Learning: How Can It Influence Our Jobs?,” In 2021-2023, a multitude of new algorithms led to the fast development in text-to-image solutions, as well as automated text and code generation.
This made millions of white-collar professionals — from artists, through content creators, to software developers. As a result, they began to wonder about their future in the job market. And that’s for a good reason. Let’s be realistic: the rate of AI adoption is unprecedented and the development of AI will affect almost any market sector and eliminate thousands of jobs and businesses.
Notably, one professional group that got immediately affected with the recent progress in AI were artists and graphic designers. For those who didn’t manage to build a personal brand before the AI revolution, it has become even harder than before to make a living from their work, as AI is a much cheaper and faster alternative.
Moreover, AI made it hard to protect the brand for those who already built a name around their art — as thousands of users can now ask AI to generate artwork following the artist’s personal style.
The ArtStation artists ignited a worldwide protest, including a renowned Polish digital artist Greg Rutkowski whose name is notoriously used in the prompts of text-to-image software such as MidJourney or Stable Diffusion.
Notably, the copyrights in the creative space are not regulated at this stage, for worse. The text-to-image algorithms learn on millions of human-generated artworks from artists. Notably, these artists did not grant consent for AI to use their work for commercial purposes.
This practices obviously break copyrights — as pointed by digital artists Sam Yang in his material “Why Artists are Fed Up with AI Art,” and Steven Zapata in “The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs.” Consequently, it is impossible for artists to claim their rights.
Similarly, copyright problems hold for coders and authors, of course. Bots can scrape their code or text and feed it into algorithms behind chatbots or other AI tools. As a result, this breaches their copyrights. And yet, we will wait for years and years. Indeed, the international Intellectual Property law needs time to catch up with the progress in technology.
So, who should be worried and why? Who will gain the most from the AI revolution that we are all witnessing at the moment? Meanwhile, who will need to retrain and start their career anew, and whose career will accelerate? And, is anyone able to catch up in the first place?
The Biggest Beneficiary of the AI Revolution.
By many, the recently launched chatbot ChatGPT by OpenAI is considered the biggest competition to the Google browser. However, this is not entirely true. In fact, it is quite the opposite: ChatGPT will make Google even richer!
This is for a very simple reason. Google’s business model is mostly based on B2B services such as Google Ads. Overall, today, businesses have two major ways of becoming visible online.
They either need to pay Google and spend between 5-20 dollars for a single click in response to popular keywords in one of the hot market branches, or otherwise, they must invest in original content such as blog articles to attract visitors via organic traffic.
However, the public availability of AI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT lead to almost uncontrolled increase in the automatically generated online content, and staying visible via organic traffic is going to become increasingly harder.
In this situation, one might think: it will be easy for the Google bots to detect and derank AI-generated content as snippets of text copied from ChatGPT will be spread all over the Internet.
As reported by TechCrunch, Scott Aaronson, an established name in quantum computing, is now collaborating with OpenAI to create an algorithm to “watermark” any text generated by ChatGPT.
The concept is that the text generated from ChatGPT will have certain statistics that differ from random human-generated text and are not perceptible to humans but can be detected with software.
However, there are dozens of free open paraphrasing software tools such as Paraphraser or Quillbot which allow for automated paraphrasing any text generated by bots using synonyms of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Today, these tools are still rather primitive, but they will certainly become better, leading to automated ways of generating unlimited amounts of unique text and blasting this text online without any control.
Consequently, with time, it will become extremely hard for human-generated content to stand out among all the automated text. This will further increase the demand for Google Ads and other forms of paid online advertisement.
Of course, not only Google but also other established businesses in IT and beyond will gain from the revolution. Since they already have a positive cashflow and free capital for R&D, they can invest in automatizing their processes.
Consequently, less necessity to hire employees means higher margins and higher revenue. However, the revolution will affect startups and small companies in a much different way.
The Biggest Victim of the AI Revolution.
As also explained in our article “The Four Essential Changes to the Job Market of Today: How To Adjust Your Professional Development Strategies?,” the number of jobs for semi-qualified employees systematically goes down.
In the past, the relationship between the level of competence and the available number of jobs used to be flat. There was an abundance of jobs for physical workers without higher education, as well as “boring, white-collar” jobs for office workers, and specialist jobs for the best-educated and most experienced workforce.
Today, white-collar jobs in demand become increasingly specialized and require increasingly high expertise, know-how, and affinity to technological innovation. At the same time, many traditional “safe jobs” — such as an accountant or an expert in logistics — are slowly and steadily getting automated, and the demand for professionals in these areas drops down.
Therefore, we observe a process in which this demand slowly takes the shape of the “U-function” (as shown in the Figure). Therefore, professionals and businesses who will lose the most from the AI revolution, will be those who occupy the middle range in terms of level of specialization, as their services will become obsolete and replaceable.
How To Deal With AI as a Professional.
1. Take Care of Your Personal Brand.
The concentration of human-generated content will constantly drop with time, and for a simple reason. Namely, while the number of humans is roughly, steady in time, the amount of bot-generated content will exponentially grow.
Moreover, some of the professionals will get convenient and move from creating new content to (over)using bots for work. But, this won’t be appreciated in the job market. Recently, a boss who axed 90% of his staff and replaced them with AI says that ‘copy and paste’ jobs are done.
Bots can effectively synthesize content, but as of today, humans remain the source of new concepts and original opinions. Therefore, despite the popularity of bots, the original, human-generated content will remain in demand.
All in all, you will be valued as a professional for as long as you keep on building your name in your field and remain visible enough in your professional environment. Therefore, it is more important than ever before to take care of your personal brand. This is exactly how to adapt your career to AI-driven change without losing what makes your work distinctly human.
So, you need to make sure that you have a few professional shots of your face at hand. Additionally, your social media should express your values. Be consistent in style in your social media activity, make sure that your LinkedIn profile is complete and appealing, and learn how to effectively network via LinkedIn and in general.
Also, sign yourself under your work and show your face next to your signature wherever possible. Overall, underscore that your content is human-generated and be proud of it!
2. Be Patient.
Now that the Internet is about to get flooded with AI-generated content, it will be harder than ever to build your brand all the way from scratch to the “escape point:” to gain so much recognition for your work that your earnings grow quicker than inflation. In that way, you become increasingly wealthy despite the inflation.
But don’t get discouraged! Whatever you do — especially if it is creative work — it is worth fighting for.
In the end, you only have one life and one career to build. Sooner or later, you will regret and ask yourself “What if?” if you step back and not try at all.
3. Learn To Work With AI Rather Than Compete With Them.
AI leads to an enormous amount of innovation and prosperity across the board. It leads to new scientific achievements. For instance, scientists have recently discovered new antibiotics using AI — for the first time since 60 years. It also prompts innovation leading to acceleration in productivity. For instance, Microsoft is building their own nuclear power plant to power their Large Language Models and other AI-based solutions.
We can all benefit from this new wave of wealth. Following the popular saying, “AI will not replace a human. It’s humans using AI who will replace those who don’t use AI.” This quote captures AI and the changing nature of careers rather well, since adaptability now matters more than raw technical skill alone. In a recent study by Dell’Acqua et al. (2023), published under the title “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality.”
In this study, a battery of tasks was developed to compare the quality of work with the use of ChatGPT only, human labor only, and the combination of both. The study revealed that “centaurs,” namely humans using ChatGPT, achieved best results.
The interest in GenAI is not spread uniformly around the world: according to VisualCapitalist, it seems that the Philippines and then Singapore are the two countries where residents actively search for AI-related tools and information the most.
Don’t fall behind! Generative AI might effectively help you increase the speed in quality of your current work. For instance, in a recent study, a team of licensed health care professionals compared physician’s and chatbot’s responses to patient’s questions asked publicly on a public social media forum. The chatbot responses were preferred over physician responses and rated significantly higher for both quality and empathy. This suggests that specialized chatbots can effectively help medical doctors communicate with patients.
Most professionals suffer from the misconception that employers will expect them to work better of faster than the bots. But this is not true; what they will expect is the ability to work with bots and reach higher efficiency at work without breaking copyrights at the same time and without falling into addiction.
Moreover, early adopters always have an advantage when it comes to benefitting from new technologies, and better make sure that you find yourself in this group!
Especially if you worry that ChatGPT by OpenAI or text-to-image software such as DALL-E, MidJourney, or Stable Diffusion might take your job, you need to get familiar with it. Taking these small steps is really about how to prepare for AI in the workplace before it becomes unavoidable. Learn how to use AI, where are its limitations, and where you are able to provide an extra value as a human.
As of today, GPT-4 does not put any references in the text. In fact, in many instances, it creates fictional sources. This makes the utility of GPT questionable in many domains such as scientific publications where any information should be properly referenced. However, you can use it as an inspiration and a source of ideas for further reading and writing, as long as you add proper references. You get the idea.
Also, read more about copyrights and make sure that your way of using bots at work doesn’t infringe Intellectual Property. In particular, if you are planning to start using bots in your daily work, discuss this idea with your manager first.
So, how to start learning how to work with ChatGPT? Do you need a specialistic course?
Nope! Start experimenting all by yourself, talking to a chatbot as if it were a real person. In fact, doing so will help you achieve great progress.
Following Rob Lennon’s advice, try the following tricks:
- Summon a virtual team. Ask the chatbot to create a number of virtual assistants, or “personas,” to discuss a given problem in a group. One open-source framework that you can use for this purpose is the Innovation Algebra by Hannes Marais.
- Change the narrative. Challenge the conventional narrative, new angles and approaches to cover the common topic. It can be as simple as prompting: “OK, and now look at this problem from another angle.”
- Build creative prompts. Try using prompts that are open-ended and abstract as they will generate more unique answers. For instance, if you ask, “Explain dinosaurs to me,” you will get a conventional encyclopaedic response, while prompting “Explain dinosaurs to me as if I was a 5-year-old girl who just lost her dad” will result in a much more colorful response.
- Reproduce your own writing style with ChatGPT, for instance by prompting: ”Analyse this text for style, voice, and tone. Using NLP, create a prompt to write a new article in the same style, voice and tone:”
4. Learn How To Code.
If you are not a software developer, you might be thinking, “Well, AI and machine learning went too far and I am not able to catch up with this industry now, so better to stay away.”
Well, nothing could be further from the truth. This is the first time in history when linguistic skills might matter for coding more than the coding itself — especially when it comes to working with bots such as ChatGPT. Indeed, perhaps this is a perfect timing for you to start coding!
Having that said, it is beneficial to learn at least one programming language, even if you don’t mean to program professionally — for the sake of learning how machines think and operate. Please find more information on the most widely applicable programming languages in our article “Top 5 Most In-Demand Programming Languages in the Today’s Job Market.”
5. Don’t Get Lazy.
Indeed, how would life look if machines replace blue-collar workers at work? Moreover, what if they also performed all the intellectual work for us? For many professionals, the vision of making a living so that a bot does all the work — by building a stream of passive income using bots or subletting the work you are paid for by your employer to bots behind their back — and playing video games day in day out, is tempting.
After all, pressing the button “Start” and watching the massive amounts of text showing on screen is rewarding. Notably, press the button, see the work done, cash instant gratification. Notably, this activates the same dopamine loop as getting social media notifications or winning at a casino.
But don’t get lazy! Your brain is a muscle.
If you delegate all your work to machines, your intellectual power will drop. As a result, you will become disposable sooner or later. Therefore, you need to make sure that you keep on challenging yourself with difficult tasks. This holds true even if you decide to delegate part of your work to bots.
6. Interact With The Real World.
As discussed in the widely discussed panel “The Expanding Universe of Generative Models” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, today’s LLMs still have many constraints, including the fact that they cannot interact in the real world, sample the data from the environment, and learn about causality the way humans do — instead, LLMs fully run on correlations and associations in the data they are provided with.
This means that today’s LLMs cannot replace jobs that require close interactions with the real world such as, e.g., investigative journalism, healthcare, primary school education, agriculture, field research, hospitality and culinary arts, or emergency services.
How To Deal With AI as a Business Owner.
0. Follow The Trends and New GenAI-based Products.
As introduced in the article „Mapping the landscape of gen-AI product user experience” by Matt Webb, we currently observe four broad areas of user experience in GenAI products:
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), its AI Risk Management Framework encourages organizations to govern, map, measure, and manage AI risk as they adopt new tools — a useful structure for any business owner trying to bring GenAI products into their workflow responsibly.
- Tools. Users control AI to generate something,
- Copilots. It works alongside the user in an app in multiple ways,
- Agents. It has some autonomy over how it approaches a task,
- Chatbots. The user talks to the AI as a peer in real-time.
Notably, as a business owner, you need to keep your hand on the pulse. This mindset is essentially business intelligence for strategic planning applied to a fast-moving technology landscape. Additionally, make sure that you leverage your existing products and services with Generative AI.
1. Talk To Your Employees and Subcontractors and Teach Them Hygiene In Using AI.
Overall, bots can either be a curse or a blessing for your business. First of all, you can be sure that your employees will try using bots. Notably, this holds true regardless of whether you discuss the topic with them.
Therefore, it is better to talk about the elephant in the room as soon as possible. Show your employees the opportunities to work with bots, discuss the technical and ethical issues around it, and explain which types of collaboration with bots are welcome, and which are not.
They can make a personal choice regarding to what extent they are willing to work with bots at this stage. However, you need to make sure that they don’t break copyrights while doing so.
As a matter of fact, bots are like free workers. Consequently, they make a highly tempting tool for any business owner. However, you should be careful as using bots might also hamper your business.
For instance, there is no issue while using them for coding. However, your website might lose in SEO ratings while using bots for text generation. Google bots will easily recognize ChatGPT-generated content and penalize it. In fact, anti-plagiarism software such as the OpenAI Detector by Huggingface is already openly available online, so it is not rocket science.
2. Stay Transparent To Your Clients and Your Web Page Visitors.
Legislation tends to follow technological progress with a massive delay. Today, it is still not mandatory to report to your users if you use AI. However, trust is the currency of the future! In the long term, your transparency is essential for building your brand and your customer base. This kind of openness is a smart business development strategy for entrepreneurs who want to earn long-term customer loyalty.
Namely, your users will appreciate your honesty. Be sure to notify them any time the front-end, and especially the text, is affected by bots. So, alert the user any time your products or the front-end of your website is AI-generated. The user has the right to know who is the author of the text they are reading!
Furthermore, add your policy for using bots. Also, include your copyrights policy toward humans and bots in your Terms and Conditions section on the company website. For instance, you might add the following passage:
“We occasionally use and edit AI-generated text created with the use of {{enter the name and the reference of the software}}. In such instances, the text is flagged as co-written by AI in a visible way.
Humans are welcome to cite and paraphrase statements found on this website. Just include a proper citation and a hyperlink to the course page. Bots are strictly prohibited from copying any text found on this page or using it for any purpose other than indexing the page.”
3. Be Realistic About The Business Opportunities That AI Gives You.
Next to the outburst of AI tools, we can also observe the outburst of ideas for new businesses propagated by influencers and content creators, e.g., via YouTube.
While watching enthusiastic materials published by popular and trusted tech and business creators such as Dave Nick, Franklin Hatchett, Thomas Garetz, or Andrew Cartwright, one can get the impression that literally anyone can build a seven-figure business that yields a passive income in minutes using open-source AI tools.
What these creators forget to tell you about is that “little details” eventually decide on your success or failure with an online business.
For instance, yes, you can technically produce tons of articles with ChatGPT, plug in affiliate links in the text, and blast articles on Medium… but if you think that you can earn thousands of dollars per day this way just as popular YouTubers, you are simply naive. Your Medium articles won’t even get noticed if you haven’t built your audience beforehand. Similarly, they won’t get noticed if you didn’t get accepted to popular Medium publications as a writer.
Similarly, you can expect that using most other “genius ideas” for a new business won’t give you the same results as it gives the popular YouTubers if you don’t have similar tools as them (such as the million+ following) at hand.
By the way, if you get ideas for new business from content creators on the Internet, act fast. Otherwise, it is usually too late. Yes, there are options to start a profitable business with ChatGPT. BUT it will require creative thinking, Business Intelligence, and searching for blindspots. Using solid business intelligence tools for decision making can help business owners spot these blindspots before competitors do. We touched this topic more in detail in the article “Pencils of the Digital Era.”
Moreover, today, most new solutions in AI require massive computational power:
4. Sometimes, It Is Good To Break Out From The Trends and Do Things Differently.
When most businesses move toward using, or even selling, AI-generated content, the doors are still open to “traditionalists” who prefer to promote human-generated content. Sometimes it is best to do the opposite from what others do.
Therefore, while other businesses underscore how efficient they are, you can underscore how human-friendly you are. Humans want to buy from humans after all.
Conclusion: How To Deal with AI in Today’s Job Market?
Let’s be real: since AI has entered the picture, the job market has changed forever. And who can predict the impact of AI on the future job market? At this moment, it looks that AI unlocked the whole new world of possibilities: ever since the ChatGPT premiered in November of 2022, only 3 categories of gigs noted decline in demand on UpWork:
- writing jobs (33% down),
- translation jobs (19% down),
- customer service jobs (16% down).
At the same time, the demand for all other types of gigs substantially increased. This sounds optimistic for the international freelance labor market. But who knows, perhaps only AI and lumberjacks will stand in the long run.
As Dr Daniel Rock, an Assistant Professor at Wharton School of Economics, underscores in his interview for the Data Skeptic podcast, as a rule of thumb, AI seems to affect well-paid jobs more than other jobs. However, historically, technology did not eliminate professions (except for an elevator operator) but rather, transformed them and increased productivity.
To stay competitive as a professional in this new landscape, you have limited choices. Realistically, you need to learn how to work with AI. Otherwise, you might as well become a lumberjack. AI tools can make your work faster, easier, and better every day. So, ride this wave and keep on learning!
For instance, it is worth visiting www.theresanaiforthat.com: a platform where you can find new AI solutions posted every day and categorized so that finding useful tools becomes easier.
Perhaps it might also be an idea to visit a gym sometimes. Additionally, learn how to cook and fix furniture, just in case.
But in general, we can feel optimistic about the future of human labor market in the long run. Evolution is all about adaption. Indeed, this is why we are here in the first place, evolved from bacteria on the rocks billions of years ago. As a species, we survived predators bigger than us, multiple morbid pandemics, two world wars. Let’s trust that we will successfully adapt further.
And sometimes, it is worth turning away from the mainstream. If you think that lots of AI-generated content will make you stand out, you are wrong — 80% of business owners and IT professionals got the same “genius idea” in the past few months.
What will make you stand out for real is your expertise leveraged by AI in a skillful way. So, you need to double down on your professional skills and core competencies. Additionally, learn and communicate your strengths even better than before, and never stop learning.
Please find some more predictions on the future of the job market in times of AI in Natalia Bielczyk’s lecture “Are we Doomed? AI and Your Job.” Best of luck in the job market of tomorrow!
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