Controversies about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) burst back into the news with the recent widespread public use of Generative AI (GAI) tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E (both developed by OpenAI). Since these tools were made publicly available, many people have expressed concerns about their effect on the future of the labor market. Unlike other common AI tools such as Google Translate and Amazon’s Alexa, these tools not only break the monopoly of corporates over knowledge, they also break the monopoly of individuals over skills. For example, an art student can now create a code while a physics student can recreate a post-modernistic painting of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. And all within seconds! Despite criticism of the quality of AI’s outcomes, one can’t help but wonder how long will it take before AI will perform exactly like a professional? Or even better?
Lior Cohen, joint CEO at O.D. Consulting, claims these changes are not necessarily a threat, but also an opportunity. AI is forcing organizations to be more creative and proactive. With massive amounts of knowledge at their disposal, corporate leaders are changing the way they think and act. In the past, they might have asked: “What knowledge do we have? And how can we use it to solve the problem?” Now they are asking: “What is our problem?”, “How can we use AI to identify it?”, And “What knowledge we can find to solve it in the most efficient way?”
Furthermore, history has taught us that major technological changes might lead to the loss of some roles in the workforce, but they also lead to the creation of many others. In addition, GAI may not only assist organizational leaders in decision-making, but also help carry out the organization’s daily tasks such as recruiting new employees, analyzing data, and writing content for your organization’s social media page.
You can look at the outputs of GAI as an online recipe. Some users will utilize them by following the instructions to the letter, while an experienced chef might see them as a model on which to experiment, perhaps by using better quality ingredients or by changing some of the recipe to suit his own or his clients’ tastes. The same applies to the work market. It’s true that GAI can do some of the work for us, but we will need specialists to monitor the software’s outputs and adapt it to fit our company’s increasingly complex needs.
In Conclusion,
Our recommendation is to try to stay ahead of the curve by keeping your finger on the pulse of new AI-based technologies, learning about them and what they offer, and discovering how to use them to your own and your organization’s advantage.
