Local academic alerts journalists may lose their jobs in AI era

Journalists, transcribers and customer service agents, among other jobs, will easily be replaced by AI when it develops further, a local academic has warned in an article.

Peter Chang, lecturer at the City University of Macau and Winson Wong, director at Public Trust International Arbitration Association (Macao) co-authored an article discussing the recent trend of AI utilization triggered by the public use of ChatGPT.

Among the aforementioned professions, proofreaders, translators, copywriters, market analysts, social media managers, dispatchers, travel agents, home tutors and recruiters are among the other professions that the duo believe to be replaced by AI.

Echoing the earlier comments from Goldman Sachs, the two see these occupations as highly repetitive and faced with a large collection of texts or data. ChatGPT’s text or script generation and natural language processing capabilities are capable of these tasks.

“As AI is highly laborious and efficient [in the aforementioned professions], it is difficult for humans to compete,” the pair commented.

Comparing the boom of AI with the era of Industrialization, the duo described the emergence and progress of ChatGPT as “a critical milestone” in the first edition of their article.

“ChatGPT has laid the foundation for the development of future AI,” the pair said, adding that it has also brought a multitude of exciting application prospects.

Their comparison, meanwhile, echoed their views set forth in the second edition of the article, which suggests that humans will not be fully replaced.

On the contrary, human beings will be expected to work in conjunction with AI. “In many aspects, humans still possess creativity, empathy and cross-aspect integrated capabilities, which are irreplaceable by AI,” Chang and Wong believe.

Regarding the reliability of ChatGPT, the duo pointed out that it often misunderstands humans and thus provides deviating responses. Besides, the system cannot distinguish if what it says is correct, despite knowing how to compile texts.

ChatGPT needs to be regularly updated to give responses related to current events. AL

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