Offloading to AI: Artificial Intelligence in the World of Work
By Kim Ochs*
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Disclaimer: The inclusion of apps and services featured in this article does not reflect any product endorsement. Links to commercial websites are not affiliate links.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools, bots, and apps are already impacting the way humans work in areas such as journalism, marketing, scheduling and project management. They are being used to optimise work, streamline operations, and even try to contribute to creative processes. Today’s applications lead to this frequently asked question: Is the role of AI to replace humans?
In May 2020, Microsoft announced that it would be laying off journalists and copywriters to replace them with AI at Microsoft News and MSN.com, affecting editors who had been part of the Search, Ads, News, Edge (SANE) division. As a Microsoft spokesperson said in a related Guardian article, “Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.” This larger optimization strategy echoes the language of offshoring and outsourcing. In 2021, the new trend is offloading to AI.
Headlime is a copywriting bot that can be used to help come up with ideas for an article. You describe your product or service in 10 words of less and the AI “trained on over 175 billion parameters” will take your idea and draft something. It writes the copy for you. The technology behind this is called GPT-3, developed by OpenAI, an AI lab backed by Elon Musk.
WriteSonic, another copywriting bot and marketing tool, can convert one-liners into ads, descriptions or ideas in 10 different languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, German and Japanese. An example featured on the website shows how you can enter in the product name, brief description, any promotion or occasion (such as a holiday discount) and it will generate multiple ads (e.g., a Facebook ad complete with an image) to reflect the tone and subject of the ad. You can edit the ad or ask for more examples to be instantly generated.
Such tools are very good in applying accumulated knowledge to the task of writing at an incredible speed, almost instantaneously, but they cannot conduct ethical checks. Nor can they pass judgements about what would or would not work well based on nuance or years of experience with an audience. The current discussion about misinformation, fake news, and disinformation in journalism, which could actually be the work of AI bots, is raising some important questions about reliability, quality, and automation. AI is taking jobs, but it cannot completely replace humans. At least not yet.
Not only do companies offload to AI, so too do individuals. Professionals and entrepreneurs use AI to conserve and optimise their most important resource: time. They are asking: What would I rather spend my time doing? What is the important work I want my staff to do? What could the machines do better? Cue the new tasks for personal AI assistants on the mobile phone and at home such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, as well as new digital helpers at the office.
As filmmaker Tiffany Schlain asked in a Cool Tools podcast episode, why have a personal assistant spend their scheduling meetings when you can have Clara, the AI scheduling bot? A product of Clara Labs, Clara can be copied in an email conversation to figure out the best time for people to speak across different time zones. As Schlain reported, “I can’t tell you how many times people are like, ‘You have the best assistant, Clara.’ And then I feel like I’m breaking their heart when I’m like, she’s a bot.” It is notable that Clara has her own human assistant back at the lab. Yet again, there is a “human in the loop”.
In addition to the virtual assistants and scheduler tools, there are AI tools for social media and optimization (e.g. Lately, HubSpot, LinkFluence, Cortex), project management analytics and reporting (e.g. Aptage, ClickUp, Workstreams). The machines are simply better at analysing huge volumes of data very quickly. But humans, empowered with these data and analytics, are essential to critically interpret and communicate the results in meaningful ways across different audiences and cultures.
The question, “Will AI replace humans?” is similar to the question we have been asking for decades: “When will we go paperless?” Neither one leads to a constructive discussion. I have yet to meet a digital native who took down the paper-based photo of their great-grandparent, scanned it, uploaded to their phone, and discarded the original.
The far more important questions we should be asking are the underlying ones about the human experience. Which human behaviours and actions do we need to understand better before we offload them to AI and machine learning systems? How and when must humans remain in the loop to ensure ethical uses of AI and humane technologies, guarding against algorithmic biases and protecting workers’ rights? What is essential to change about the world of work, particularly in the context of threats to humanity such as climate change?
The new world of work is unknown. As stated in an Institute for the Future report, many of the jobs people will have in 2030 do not yet exist. This could even include “new, uniquely human” jobs. Over the next decade, we need to collectively debate and actively decide how machines and humans can collaborate rather than compete with us, ensuring that AI supplements rather than supplants us.
*Kim Ochs has been active in the field of educational technology for more than a decade, spanning work in higher education, research, and start-ups, working with international organisations, NGOs, private companies, and edtech investors. Kim holds a doctorate in educational studies from the University of Oxford.