If you think ChatGPT will have a big impact in the future, you’re wrong: it’s already happened. Sixty percent of respondents to this survey from education website Intelligent reported they know someone who has lost their job to AI, and 57% fear losing their own job. Ten percent have completed a ChatGPT course and 30% plan to take one before the year is out.
ChatGPT has been criticized for exposing information provided in user prompts, including some that’s confidential. They’ve just added a feature that lets users stop this from happening by blocking the system from using chat history to train itself. Another new feature lets users export and review data that ChatGPT has stored about their interactions.
It’s hard to believe ChatGPT could be having so big an impact so quickly. But this research from OpenAI itself concludes that 80% of the U.S. workforce will have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by generative AI, and 19% will see 50% or more of their tasks affected. Even closer to home, Beantown Media Ventures found 29% of content marketers think AI will replace all writers in the next five years and another 40% think it will replace junior writers.
There’s no shortage of lawsuits by publishers against genAI platforms for copyright infringement; now major studios are getting with the program. Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal are accusing Midjourney of using some of their best known characters (think Darth Vader and the Minions) in its AI image generator — a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” they say. No response yet from Midjourney.