Insider Today: She lost her job to ChatGPT

“ChatGPT is going to take your job!”

For the past eight months, since OpenAI’s chatbot first graced us with its presence, ominous predictions like that have been uttered about every job under the sun.

Whether it’s financial analysts or teachers, doctors or technologists, ChatGPT has everyone on edge. Not even God can save your job from artificial intelligence, as one Colorado couple had their wedding officiated by the chatbot.

And yet, despite all the doom and gloom, it’s hard to get too worked up about the threat ChatGPT poses. Sure, by one count nearly 4,000 people lost their jobs in May because of AI. But a random number in a report doesn’t necessarily feel real.

Well, Emily Hanley is a very real person who lost her very real job because of ChatGPT. 

Emily, who is a writer and stand-up comedian, spent years working as a freelance copywriter until her assignments dried up as clients outsourced her work to ChatGPT. 

Emily documented the experience, including her three-month quest to find a new job. Now she’s serving samples of sparkling water at grocery stores to keep the lights on while she continues her search for a new job.

In the meantime, she says, she’s learned a valuable lesson: “If a robot can do your job for less, you better believe that's exactly what's going to happen.”

Perhaps Emily feels like an obvious casualty in the rise of generative AI. Copywriting falls squarely in a chatbot’s sweet spot, so it was only a matter of time before those roles got eliminated.

“AI won’t be able to do <insert your role here>,” you might think.

But, as more money pours into AI, it seems clear the tech won’t stop at taking copywriting gigs.

Apple is said to be getting in on the chatbot action, another sign this isn’t a fly-by-night trend. And one of the world’s largest consulting firms is betting big on AI upending jobs.

KPMG is investing $2 billion as part of a new partnership with Microsoft focused on generative-AI tools.

"I think some of the legacy ways of doing business executing services are going to become obsolete," Carl Carande, the US vice chair and global head of KPMG Advisory, told Insider.

Even if AI hasn’t figured out how to do your job, that doesn’t mean it won’t. The whole premise of generative AI is to constantly learn from its users. (Though whether it’s actually improving is up for debate, according to a recent report.)

Take Emily’s job search as an example. She applied for a role that ended up involving training an AI to learn how to be a better copywriter. (Talk about rubbing salt in the wound.)

So for those of you minting money using ChatGPT for your side hustles, be warned: You could be teaching your replacement.

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