ChatGPT could replace telemarketers, teachers and traders

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. AFTER DECADES of blue-collar jobs being snatched up by machines, advanced chatbots are now breathing down white collars. “Generative" artificial-intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, have made significant progress in crafting human-sounding language and grasping context.

So much so that they have leapfrogged humans in some tasks. This could make as many as 300m jobs redundant globally, according to Goldman Sachs, a bank. Several new papers consider which sectors will face the biggest shake-up (see chart).

A recent study by OpenAI, the startup that created ChatGPT, looked at the potential for automation across 1,016 occupations. Humans and AI separately rated how well software powered by large language models (LLMs), which are trained on vast chunks of the internet and then fine-tuned to specific functions, could undertake 19,000 tasks involved in the jobs. If the software, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, was deemed able to reduce the time it takes humans to complete the task by at least half, without a drop in quality, the task was considered ripe for AI replacement (a score of one meant that the whole occupation could be done in half the time).

For other tasks the annotators imagined additional software that could be added to the model, such as computer tools that can automatically pull fresh data from the internet. They found that 80% of Americans could have at least 10% of their work tasks done by advanced AI tools. The figure rises to 50% of tasks for an estimated 19% of workers.