Automated industry

The educational landscape isn’t the only thing ChatGPT is changing. As AI strengthens its ability to perform human tasks and as technology, like ChatGPT, becomes increasingly accessible, the classic trope of advanced robots taking over human jobs doesn’t seem too far from reality.

According to Business Insider, jobs in the tech, media, legal and financial industries are at the greatest risk of being replaced by ChatGPT due to companies’ monetary incentives. A Goldman Sachs report from March predicts that, due to generative AI, about 300 million full-time jobs could be exposed to automation. 

“Instead of 10 people working on some repetitive stuff, now I can just hire one person, and then leverage AI to do the jobs and allocate the resources towards other [areas],” Fan said. “To me, that’s a better use of the money and the resources for the business advantage.”

By analyzing past programming inputs, AI can act as a software engineer and write code, perhaps putting software engineering at the forefront of affected jobs. Prospective computer science major Zach Buchholz ’23 uses ChatGPT to help with foundational programming. 

“Just for fun, I asked [ChatGPT] to make a used car website and it just gave the most basic boilerplate thing,” Buchholz said. “I use [ChatGPT] as a better Google.” 

Buchholz believes ChatGPT’s utility decreases with complex projects. 

“[ChatGPT] will get close to doing full projects, but I think it’s going to have a hard time integrating parts together,” Buchholz said. “If you tell ChatGPT to do something big, it’s just going to do the simplest version … whereas humans would think about the different parts that go into it and collaborate on it.”

In addition to advanced programming, Fan believes that some jobs are protected from the impacts of AI. 

“There’s a list of fields that could be impacted by ChatGPT. On the other side of the spectrum, some fields are not going to be affected by ChatGPT. So, what is the key difference between these two boundaries — the two pillars of the fields?” Fan said. “If you have a lot of … human creativity involved, we doubt that ChatGPT is gonna replace that dramatically.” 

Additionally, Ashwini Karandikar, entrepreneurial executive and board member, feels that the possibility of inaccuracy requires humans to be cautious when looking at the output.

“[We need] more fact-checking, more validation or more human checking. And in my work, we already do that extensively,” Karandikar said. “[ChatGPT] is spitting out stuff based on what it has learned, so the person reading it needs to know and be able to decipher right from wrong.”

Additionally, bias in the workplace — already a current issue — may be exacerbated by technology like ChatGPT.

“I think we need to watch out for anything that is generative to really sift through any underlying bias overall. Also, the bias getting into the system really has to be accounted for and actively corrected so that the information that we put out is not only accurate, but it actually makes sense,” Karandikar said.

As a professor and researcher, Demir adds that ChatGPT and other AI tools can help humans make great leaps in the scientific research process. 

“I expect significant advancements in science,” Demir said. “Both students and faculty [can] work on more quality research rather than repetitive activities [like] data collection, analysis and basic stuff, which could take weeks or months. The student can do that work potentially in hours or maybe minutes with these AI systems.”

In addition to revolutionizing the research process, learning how to work with ChatGPT could create a stronger workforce.

“It’s less about taking the job away and more about becoming smarter at that job,” Karandikar said. “I think ChatGPT is probably just the first of many, many such developments that we want to see and it definitely has a promise of making all of us smarter.”

Demir holds that while ChatGPT marks a new transition in the intersection of technology and human interaction, it has the potential to be used as a safe and beneficiary tool if approached with the right mindset.

“I think we should be leveraging these tools for our work, for our life and many other aspects. We just need to accept and then potentially benefit from this, rather than being afraid,” Demir said. “It’s [a] transition process and [a] new era for us.”