How ChatGPT Could Create New Jobs

The integration of AI and machine learning is a popular solution for businesses to boost efficiency in the face of technological advancements. ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model designed for natural language processing, has the potential to revolutionize the workforce by streamlining tasks, reducing errors and improving communication.

It took ChatGPT less than 10 seconds to write that paragraph based on a simple prompt: “Write a journalistic opening to a story on how ChatGPT could grow the workforce and create jobs.”

Although one can debate whether they would be any good, journalists could write entire articles in that manner, feeding prompts to ChatGPT, Google Bard and other similar tools until they spit out articles that read as if they were crafted by human writers. Students can use the same tools to do homework, travel agents to create itineraries, lawyers to craft legal briefs, software developers to write code and chefs to develop recipes. The list goes on and on.

It’s no wonder that generative AI is taking boardrooms and classrooms by storm. With its power to do research, write emails and code web pages, there’s massive potential for disruption in how people work and what jobs they do.

For professionals whose jobs might be on the line, that’s a scary prospect. But disruption from generative AI doesn’t have to be negative. In many cases, it might actually be positive.

“Generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work,” Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, economists from Goldman Sachs, wrote in a March 2023 analysis of generative AI, in which they said generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation. “The good news is that worker displacement from automation has historically been offset by creation of new jobs, and the emergence of new occupations following technological innovations accounts for the vast majority of long-run employment growth.”

It’s a familiar tale. Every time a new technology comes along to automate tasks, prognosticators predict the end of this industry or that occupation. Instead, what often happens is that the new technology makes work better and easier for humans. And even if the technology does eliminate some jobs, it just as often creates new ones. 

Could that be the case with ChatGPT, as well? 

While there are potential pitfalls and serious ethical concerns surrounding copyright, bias and capacity, the positive implications of generative AI are significant. In the right hands, it could enhance quality of work, improve job satisfaction and productivity, and even create new career opportunities for workers. 

Peak Productivity

The way people work is changing. The same generative AI tools that auto-fill emails are now capable of writing hundreds of pages of seamless — if sometimes stiff — explanatory copy.

Jobs could be at risk. For example, Goldman Sachs’ Briggs and Kodnani said 15% to 35% of work globally could be automated. Still, they believe most jobs will be safe.

“Although the impact of AI on the labor market is likely to be significant, most jobs and industries are only partially exposed to automation and are thus more likely to be complemented rather than substituted by AI,” observed the economists. They said workers in partially automated occupations will enjoy increased capacity and bandwidth that they can apply to productive activities that increase business output.

Major tech companies leading the charge include Microsoft, Google and ChatGPT creator OpenAI, not to mention IBM, Amazon, Baidu and Tencent. Instead of a bleak, robot-driven workplace, these companies are pitching a happier and more productive workforce devoid of gruntwork.

“We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth: powerful copilots designed to remove the drudgery from our daily tasks and jobs, freeing us to rediscover the joy of creation,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a March 2023 presentation, during which Microsoft announced plans to launch a suite of AI-powered tools by the end of the year.

Utilizing the same technology that powers ChatGPT, users of popular Microsoft tools like Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and Word will be able to summarize lengthy email conversations to quickly draft suggested replies, transcribe meeting notes during video calls, automatically generate charts and graphs from raw data, and transform text documents into polished slide presentations.

The time savings and productivity gains from these and other generative AI capabilities could eventually drive a 7% increase — almost $7 trillion per year — in annual global GDP over a 10-year period, according to Briggs and Kodnani. 

“Although the size of AI’s impact will ultimately depend on its capability and adoption timeline … our estimates highlight the enormous economic potential of generative AI if it delivers on its promise,” they explained.

New ChatGPT Jobs

Tech giants aren’t the only ones working on generative AI. With help from venture capitalists that want to leapfrog OpenAI, startups also are creating new generative AI tools and services, such as AI customer support that aids small businesses hosted on Shopify and AI copilots for data analytics.

In the first few months of 2023, more than 150 generative AI startups have raised or are in talks to raise upwards of $700 million cumulatively, according to reports. 

“If there is a single shining star in the sea of gloom, it is generative AI,” Venky Ganesan, a partner at Menlo Ventures, said in an interview with Yahoo! Finance. 

“That’s why it’s also hyped up the way it is. You cannot go to a coffee shop in Palo Alto, or the Village Pub in Woodside, without overhearing three different conversations about generative AI.”

The boom in generative AI startups is creating a boom in generative AI jobs. Along with IT professionals and software developers who can help them create generative AI tools — perhaps with code-writing assistance from ChatGPT — companies need team members who can help them use generative AI tools.

Over the last few months, for example, many companies have posted positions for “AI whisperers” and ChatGPT prompt engineers whose job is crafting ways for enterprises to best leverage generative AI.

After all, ChatGPT is basically a really sophisticated search engine: What you get out of the tool depends on what you put into it. Prompt engineers and AI whisperers create and refine the text prompts that users enter into generative AI tools with hopes of generating the best possible results with the fewest possible attempts.

“Crafting prompts is hard, and — I think this is a human flaw — it’s often quite hard to find the right words to describe what you want,” software developer Ben Stokes told The Washington Post. 

“In the same way software engineers are more valuable than the laptops they write on, people who write prompts well will have such leverage over the people that can’t. They’ll essentially just have superpowers.”

As founder of PromptBase, a marketplace for generative AI prompts, Stokes has found a way to monetize those superpowers. Roughly 700 prompt engineers already are using PromptBase to sell prompts by commission, he said.

Moving from Products to Processing

Kurt Stavenhagen, instructor of writing, rhetoric and composition at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, is working to prepare students for this new job market. In his courses, he helps them navigate potential use cases for generative AI as well as emerging ethical concerns.

Stavenhagen said there’s a lot of fear in academia and the professional world around ChatGPT because of its ability to produce products — for example, a convincing argumentative essay, a poem, or even a symphony. But that fear is largely unfounded.

“The writing ChatGPT produces is technically a product, and it could be used as a product through prompting,” Stavenhagen said. “That can be useful for entry-level work in certain functional capacities, but … often the writing is a little stiff,” he explained. “Our language is deeply human, and it changes, so I encourage students to think about how to continue to be human around this new technology and how we use it.”

Instead of using it to create products, Stavenhagen said he encourages students and professionals to use ChatGPT as a processing tool — that is, as a tool to help them initiate, revise and rethink their work. When it’s used in that capacity, he believes generative AI can be a tool that increases and enhances learning instead of supplanting it.

“For many students, when it comes to professional writing, it’s like they are driving at night without headlights; it's easy to break down that way. ChatGPT can help … students get started — breaking down some of that intimidation factor,” Stavenhagen said.

As with most technologies, the potential for abuse and misuse is real. Instead of fixating on the downside, however, educators and employers have an opportunity to shape the future of generative AI by embracing the upside.

Briggs and Kodnani said to just look at what happened with the internet.

“Information technology innovations introduced new occupations like webpage designers, software developers and digital marketing professionals, but also increased aggregate income and indirectly drove demand for service sector workers in industries like health care, education and food services,” they concluded.

Briggs and Kodnani said 60% of workers today are employed in occupations that did not exist in 1940 — implying that over 85% of employment growth over the last 80 years is explained by the creation of new positions as a result of technology.

“If AI delivers on its promised capabilities,” they continued, “it has the potential to significantly disrupt labor markets and spur global productivity growth over the coming decades.”

Jacob Gedetsis is a contributing writer. His work has appeared in The Kansas City Star, The Post Standard and The Plain Dealer, among others. Find him on Twitter at @JacobGedetsis.

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