Jessie Gurunathan: Is AI coming for my job?

How do we make friends with AI when almost every industry will be improved by it but our jobs may disappear because of it?

OPINION

Just this week, in the headlines, I’ve seen a prestigious photography competition winner admit his winning image was fake. A song collaboration by Drake and The Weeknd called Heart On My Sleeve that’s been trending on TikTok and streaming services like Spotify has just been pulled, and a statement was released by Universal Music Group condemning the song, which turned out to be completely fake. The culprit? AI, or more precisely, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).

As a creative, my entire livelihood has revolved around my ability to write, sing, lend my voice to radio and television commercials, and the art of visual storytelling. So with the arrival of AI, I must admit, hearing about artwork and music being created sans actual photographers and musicians, I can’t help but feel slightly uneasy, and I’m embarrassed to admit, I even feel a bit threatened.

I knew major technology advancements were always inevitable, after all, I lived in Tokyo for six years when every day felt like I was living 10 years in the future. But I guess I was incredibly naive in thinking that those of us who worked within creative fields were sort of untouchable.

Don’t get me wrong, I know AI is doing some genuinely incredible things at the moment. Not only text and image generation, which most of us have heard about, seen, or experimented with, but it’s helping surge advancements in a number of fields. For example, AI is helping pharmaceutical companies identify and develop new drugs more quickly and efficiently. By generating new chemical compounds and predicting their properties, AI can reduce the cost and time required for drug development. It’s also assisting architects and urban planners in designing and optimising buildings and cities. This technology can generate new designs, layouts and configurations based on specific requirements and constraints. A Gartner report even predicts that by 2030, a major blockbuster film will be released with 90 per cent of the film generated by AI, up from 0 per cent in 2022. Basically, if you can think of an industry, there will be a way where AI can improve it. An example that hits close to home for me is virtual influencers, these AI-generated characters are designed to have human-like personalities and attributes. They are created by people or brands who customise the character’s identity and characteristics to suit their image and message.

These digital avatars are often used for marketing campaigns and are sometimes paired with real-life human beings for promotional and social media shoots. This humanisation enables them to propose fundamental ideas and sentiments to their followers. The messages they convey can be positive and beneficial if used correctly.

However, I’m definitely not looking at this through rose-tinted glasses. There are aspects of AI that make me feel like if we aren’t careful, we’ll be living in a dystopian future straight out of an episode of Black Mirror. One of the most alarming concerns of AI is its potential for nefarious purposes, such as the creation of fake content, including deepfakes and revenge porn.

Deepfakes are manipulated videos or images that are made to look real but are actually fabricated, and they can be used to spread false information or manipulate public opinion. A recent example of this that was making the rounds online was three images of police officers holding on to former President Donald Trump, and another of Trump running from officers. These images went viral, with many people believing what they were seeing was real. However, the person who initially shared them on Twitter admitted to using Midjourney V5, an artificial intelligence generator, to create the images.

Then there’s revenge porn, the non-consensual sharing of sexually explicit images or videos with the intention to humiliate or blackmail the victim. Now, with Generative AI’s help, it’s never been easier to fabricate these harmful types of content with a high degree of realism, making them difficult to detect and stop. Another concern is the potential job displacement that could happen with the wide adoption of AI as it can create content with a high degree of realism, speed and efficiency, making it possible to produce large volumes of content at a low cost. This could threaten the livelihoods of many content creators, myself included. This isn’t even touching on the ethical and privacy concerns surrounding its use, of which there are vast amounts.

I feel like self-confessed tech plebs like me aren’t quite ready for the pace at which these AI advancements are happening. I finally empathise with my parent’s generation, where the pace at which this is unfolding feels, at times, overwhelming. It’s that whole fear of the unknown, where my first instinct is to bury my head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening, but if I continue on this way, I’ll inevitably be left behind.

So, how do slightly hesitant elder millennials like myself, and even boomers like my parents, catch up? How do we access information and services that assist us in wrapping our heads around how we incorporate AI into our everyday lives? Because at the moment, it often feels like I’d have better luck attempting to learn how to speak J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional Elvish language.

Oh, and here’s the real kicker, did I or didn’t I just use AI to assist me with researching and editing this article? Heck, maybe I didn’t even write any of this!

Until things become more regulated and there are systems designed to safeguard and help us differentiate between what is real and what isn’t, this may continue being a bit of a mind-bending guessing game - and I, for one, don’t want to play it.