News Two Hundred and Thirty-eight: The workers already replaced by artificial intelligence

Until recently Dean Meadowcroft was a copywriter in a small marketing department.

His duties included writing press releases, social media posts and other content for his company.

But then, late last year, his firm introduced an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system.

“At the time the idea was that it would be working alongside human lead copywriters to help speed up the process, essentially streamline things a little bit more,” he says.

Mr Meadowcroft was not particularly impressed with the AI’s work.

“It just kind of made everybody sound middle of the road, on the fence, and exactly the same, and therefore nobody really stands out.”

The content also had to be checked by human staff to make sure it had not been lifted from anywhere else.

But the AI was fast. What might take a human copywriter between 60 and 90 minutes to write, the AI could do in 10 minutes or less.

Around four months after the AI was introduced, Mr Meadowcroft’s four-strong team was laid off.

Mr Meadowcroft can’t be certain, but he’s pretty sure the AI replaced them.

“I did laugh-off the idea of AI replacing writers, or affecting my job, until it did,” he said.

The latest wave of AI hit late last year when OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

Backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT can give human-like responses to questions and can, in minutes, generate essays, speeches, even recipes.

Other tech giants are scrambling to launch their own systems

While not perfect, such systems are trained on the ocean of data available on the internet – an amount of information impossible for even a team of humans to digest.

So that’s left many wondering which jobs might be at risk.