As a rising senior here at F&M, I have been considering which kinds of jobs I would like to apply to in the future. This means I have been mainly looking online for jobs related to what I want to do, not necessarily to apply to all of them but to scope my options and see what I would realistically enjoy doing. In this process, I have noticed something particular in these jobs that is something that I can’t shake away, something that personally bothers me to the core, and I am not confident that it will ever go away. The oversaturation of AI jobs.
Now, I haven’t been looking overly hard on various sites, so this viewpoint may be biased based on what’s being fed to me within my algorithm. However, I’m still seeing so many jobs masquerading as tasks that would be work created by a human, but when I click on the job posting to read the description, it’s actually a job where I would help enhance an AI system. To be more specific, I have looked up jobs specific to psychology and/or a copyeditor as part of a writing organization, and I either see a job that seems too good to be true to help teach others about psychology, but it’s a job where I would be feeding information related to psychology into the algorithm. On another job posting, it looks like a creative writing job where I submit my writing, but never mind, it’s a job to put this writing into AI to try and make its creative writing system “better,” which is an entirely different rant. To my dismay, these are all just jobs where I feed the information that I know into an AI system, and I see this way more often than not on Linkedin, even though I don’t tell the platform to put AI-related jobs in my recommended.
My viewpoint on AI is very mixed. On the one hand, I have seen stories in which AI is beneficial in making new scientific discoveries. When used as a tool, not to cheat and not just to copy and paste whatever it spits out at you and trust it blindly, it can help make things more efficient. On the other hand, I have a lot more reservations about AI. As mentioned, it has been abused way too much, and people use it entirely without putting their work and thoughts into it. I’ve heard stories where jobs encourage people to use AI by not contributing their ideas and just letting a computer do it for them 24/7, which I believe is problematic as it is a threat to creativity and nothing original would be made. Not to mention using AI for creative writing and AI-generated art which is… atrocious, to say the least, including the issues with using too much water to power their system which in turn has negative impacts on the environment, etc. However, if people want to use it, I can’t control them. But these jobs that are being pushed on my feed, without even asking for them to appear, the overbearing amount of it is getting concerning to me.
Disregarding any possible benefits that I am unaware of, what if people just don’t want to deal with AI at all? That should be a person’s prerogative and they should not have it be forced on them if they don’t want to use it morally. If there is a large ‘push’ for AI in the job market, making it seem more of a requirement, that is an issue for people who don’t care for it or want to contribute their own work into their jobs. The increase in commercial AI apps, such as ChatGPT, being marketed as just bots that can “do your work for you,” is also problematic as it incentivizes job spaces to cut corners, which hurts the work ethic and the creative process. These factors are why I see it being pushed in jobs more often. Can I choose not to have AI incorporated into my work at all? Can there be an option to toggle off AI-related jobs being fed into my algorithm, or is the job market going to be overrun with AI jobs too much to the point where I feel like I don’t even have a choice in the matter, based on what I want to do for my future career? This option to leave space for AI to be an optional tool, not a replacement for people’s entire work or somebody’s job, would be beneficial.
Yes, I could just ignore these jobs and this whole conversation entirely, but that doesn’t mean an overtaking of AI, and the threat to creative employment shouldn’t be addressed. The ideal solution should be allowing people to choose whether or not to have AI used in their job, without making it an overbearing presence in people’s lives. Let’s just hope that people can still have a choice in the matter.
Junior Gab Neal is the Managing Editor. Her email is gneal@fandm.edu.