Extract from ABC News
In 2023, with artificial intelligence (AI) hype at fever pitch, white-collar workers were told that, maybe one day soon, their roles would be automated.
Somewhere between a quarter and a half of existing jobs would be replaced, according to high-profile predictions.
A year later, many workers may be scratching their head. Sure, AI tools are becoming more common, but they're generally a long way from automating entire roles.
A real estate agent might use ChatGPT to write a property listing, but AI can't yet open the door of the house.
Still, there are a few professions that are already feeling the bite — and the experiences of these workers may be a helpful insight into what's to come for those who aren't yet affected.
Copywriters, and in particular freelance copywriters, are seeing large parts of their work automated, and their labour devalued.
They're now adapting by learning new AI skills and and specialising in the types of work the bots are currently bad at.
So, are these copywriters the canaries in the coal mine for AI-led automation?
Here's what they have to say about the future of work.
An AI tool crashes through a profession
Last year, not long after the launch of ChatGPT, Leanne Shelton braced herself for turbulent times.
The Sydney-based copywriter, who'd built up her freelance business over nine years, knew that change was coming.
And she knew that freelancers, who were less insulated from market shocks than permanent employees, were going to feel the impact first.
For Ms Shelton, business soon started drying up.
"Clients were like, 'There's this free tool. Why would we invest $2,000 for copywriting when we can get something for free?'"
Tim King, a Bendigo-based copywriter, experienced the same.
"I saw a 45 per cent reduction in overall lead generation," he said.
Lindsay, a copywriter in Sydney, was made redundant at a cybersecurity firm.
"They wanted to save costs and so they cut my role," she said.
"They thought the executives could write their own content using ChatGPT."
Looking for employment, she was alarmed by how far salaries in her line of work, and at her level of experience, had fallen.
"A job that would have been mid-management level on $120,000 plus super is now around $90,000."
Tanya Abdul Jalil, a freelance education writer, has colleagues "desperately scratching" for work.
"Especially the ones whose blogs are their bread and butter," she said.
"Something that used to take four to five hours and get them a full day's pay can be produced in minutes."
Perth-based copywriter Kara Stokes sees many in her profession left with a simple choice: adapt or get out.
"It’s like Blockbuster Video," she said.
"They didn't adapt and we saw what happened there."
The problem of measuring AI's effects on employment
If AI is already having such a dramatic impact on copywriters, how is this reflected in their workforce statistics?
The short answer is that it's not. Or at least not yet, experts say.
"Workforce statistics always lag reality, right?" Kylie Walker, CEO of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), said.
"But when you're hearing the same stories arising in multiple places, then it's time to start listening."
Measuring how AI affects employment in general is a problem for economists.
This is partly due a lack of data. Employers may not be transparent about why they're laying off workers or cutting hours.
The effect of an AI tool that augments an existing role, rather than replacing it, may not show in employment figures either.
But some studies can detect recent trends.
Around midway through last year, three US economists studied jobs and earnings data for copywriters and graphic designers on major online freelancing platforms.
They chose freelancers partly because they were most exposed to the repercussions of AI automation, one of the economists, Washington University's Oren Reshef, said.
"Freelancers are generally less protected from adverse market shocks compared to more standard employment.
"And at the current state of the technology, I believe AI is much better able to replace specific, well-designed tasks, like a short freelance project."
That is, freelancers don't have much job security, and their work is more likely to consist of short, well-defined tasks, which makes it easier to feed this work to AI.
The results of the study were published as a non-peer-reviewed working paper in August.
They showed within a few months of ChatGPT's launch, copywriters and graphic designers saw a significant drop in the number of jobs they got, and even steeper declines in earnings.
And when they dug deeper into the data, the economists found an interesting trend.
Being a more skilled freelancer was no defence against loss of work or earnings.
This may seem counter-intuitive at first, Dr Reshef said, "but it makes a lot of sense on second thought.
"Who do we expect to benefit the most from a new technology that improves the quality your work or your output? Probably those that didn't do a great job to begin with.
"Simply put, AI helps level the playing field across all workers."
Automation doesn't mean mass unemployment
Just as less experienced copyrighters might earn more by generating and editing AI content, an experienced copywriter who once earned a decent wage may be paid less to do the same job.
Mr King, the Bendigo-based copywriter, has noticed this trend.
"AI has lowered the bar and increased the ability for [non-copywriters] to generate content," he said.
"Our creative services as a whole have been devalued."
But there's a risk of generalising too much from short-term data like those used in last year's freelancer study, said Xiang Hui, also from Washington University and a co-author of the working paper.
Technology changes, but so do people. AI may improve and be able to automate a higher proportion of existing roles, but people adapt. They learn new skills and apply for new kinds of jobs.
Dr Hui said it's hard to predict what will happen in the long run.
"The technology improves and its capability to replace certain jobs gets better.
"But workers increasingly adopt these new technologies, and the nature of jobs and skills they require may also change over time."
Late last year, ATSE announced that AI could automate 25 to 46 per cent of existing Australian jobs by 2030.
But automation doesn't equal unemployment, Ms Walker, ATSE CEO, said.
"There will be a shift in where the employment occurs, and in what people are employed for.
"Jobs will be there. They just may not be the jobs that we intimately know today."
Copywriters are adapting to AI
So what can copywriters teach us about adapting to AI?
Having seen the writing on the wall, Ms Shelton, the Sydney-based copywriter, swiftly pivoted to AI coaching last year.
She now earns more from teaching people how to use generative AI tools than she does from copywriting.
"I pretty much started listening to podcasts and reading books about AI," she said.
"[When] 150 people registered for the first webinar, I realised I was onto something."
Zoe Simmons, who has physical and mental disabilities, said her type of writing — focusing on her experience of disabilities — meant she'd avoided the downturn.
"Thankfully lived experience is something a robot or AI cannot do," she said.
Mr King has rebranded as a marketing strategist, advising clients on how to promote their product, rather than just writing copy.
And when he does write copy, he uses AI.
Projects that took two weeks now take two days, and he charges the same, he said.
"For me it's a tool that I use to infinitely speed up my processes.
"Potentially AI will take your job but at the end of the day it means we can shift into higher value work."
Whether or not AI means workers end up doing less of the drudge work, early studies show it can boost the efficiency of "knowledge workers" (such as analysts, engineers, and accountants) at some tasks.
In a recent Harvard Business School study, employees at Boston Consulting Group were randomly assigned access to GPT-4, OpenAI's latest large language model.
Those using AI completed 12.2 per cent more tasks while doing them 25.1 per cent faster. They also produced higher quality work compared to those not using AI.
As with the freelancer study, the least-skilled workers benefited the most from AI.
"People in the lower half of that distribution had a much larger productivity bump," Edward McFowland, co-author of the Harvard study, said at the time.
"But on average, everyone seems to do better.”
AI can be helpful, but sometimes not
These findings may sound simple enough, but there's one big catch that has implications for how AI may be used to automate office work.
When the Boston Consulting Group consultants were given tasks beyond a certain threshold of complexity and nuance, those who used AI did worse.
That is, AI isn't always helpful.
Sometimes, it makes workers worse at their job.
And it gets still more complicated. Some AI-assisted consultants bucked the trend and did better at the more complex tasks than those not using AI.
The researchers' conclusion may be heartening for any white-collar worker concerned that a wave of automation will sweep them out of the office.
AI use should be tightly supervised and — at least for now — reserved for a narrow range of tasks, Dr McFowland said.
"Companies cannot simply ignore these tools, because they have tremendous value that their competitors will be exploiting," he said.
"However, turning them loose on all use cases can have an array of detrimental consequences."
Has the impact of AI been overstated?
Companies that ditched their copywriters may be experiencing the "detrimental consequences" of having too much faith in AI, according to those same copywriters.
Freelancers report old clients getting back in touch and admitting the bot's copy wasn't up to scratch.
"It has a very Americanised tone, the grammar is all off, and the sentiment is a bit strange as well," Mr King said.
"I've noticed a swing back to copywriters."
An MIT study published last month suggested AI won't replace as many jobs as predicted by studies in 2023.
Jobs previously identified as being at risk of AI displacement weren't currently "economically beneficial" to automate.
For instance, in some cases, buying and maintaining AI systems to automate certain tasks was more expensive than employing a human.
If 2023 was the year of AI hype, 2024 may see the excitement cool to a gentle simmer as reality sets in.
In any case, the job of copywriting won't ever be the same.
"We're not going to sit there and write a 300-word synopsis any more," Mr King said.
"That's in the past. We can give that to ChatGPT."
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