While ChatGPT stokes fears of mass layoffs, new jobs are being spawned to review AI
The logo of generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, which is owned by Microsoft-backed company OpenAI.
CFOTO | Future Publishing via Getty Images
Artificial intelligence might be driving concerns over people’s job security — but a new wave of jobs are being created that focus solely on reviewing the inputs and outputs of next-generation AI models.
Since Nov. 2022, global business leaders, workers and academics alike have been gripped by fears that the emergence of generative AI will disrupt vast numbers of professional jobs.
Generative AI, which enables AI algorithms to generate humanlike, realistic text and images in response to textual prompts, is trained on vast quantities of data.
It can produce sophisticated prose and even company presentations close to the quality of academically trained individuals.
That has, understandably, generated fears that jobs may be displaced by AI.
Morgan Stanley estimates that as many as 300 million jobs could be taken over by AI, including office and administrative support jobs, legal work, and architecture and engineering, life, physical and social sciences, and financial and business operations.
But the inputs that AI models receive, and the outputs they create, often need to be guided and reviewed by humans — and this is creating some new paid careers and side hustles.
Getting paid to review AI
Prolific, a company that helps connect AI developers with research participants, has had direct involvement in providing people with compensation for reviewing AI-generated material.
The company pays its candidates sums of money to assess the quality of AI-generated outputs. Prolific recommends developers pay participants at least $12 an hour, while minimum pay is set at $8 an hour.
The human reviewers are guided by Prolific’s customers, which include Meta, Google, the University of Oxford and University College London. They help reviewers through the process, learning about the potentially inaccurate or otherwise harmful material they may come across.
They must provide consent to engage in the research.
One research participant CNBC spoke to said he has used Prolific on a number of occasions to give his verdict on the quality of AI models.
The research participant, who preferred to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns, said that he often had to step in to provide feedback on where the AI model went wrong and needed correcting or amending to ensure it didn’t produce unsavory responses.
He came across a number of instances where certain AI models were producing things that were problematic — on one occasion, the research participant would even be confronted with an AI model trying to convince him to buy drugs.
He was shocked when the AI approached him with this comment — though the purpose of the study was to test the boundaries of this particular AI and provide it with feedback to ensure that it doesn’t cause harm in future.
The new ‘AI workers’
Phelim Bradley, CEO of Prolific, said that there are plenty of new kinds of “AI workers” who are playing a key role in informing the data that goes into AI models like ChatGPT — and what comes out.
As governments assess how to regulate AI, Bradley said that it’s “important that enough focus is given to topics including the fair and ethical treatment of AI workers such as data annotators, the sourcing and transparency of data used to build AI models, as well as the dangers of bias creeping into these systems due to the way in which they are being trained.”
“If we can get the approach right in these areas, it will go a long way to ensuring the best and most ethical foundations for the AI-enabled applications of the future.”
In July, Prolific raised $32 million in funding from investors including Partech and Oxford Science Enterprises.
The likes of Google, Microsoft and Meta have been battling to dominate in generative AI, an emerging field of AI that has involved commercial interest primarily thanks to its frequently floated productivity gains.
However, this has opened a can of worms for regulators and AI ethicists, who are concerned there is a lack of transparency surrounding how these models reach decisions on the content they produce, and that more needs to be done to ensure that AI is serving human interests — not the other way around.
Hume, a company that uses AI to read human emotions from verbal, facial and vocal expressions, uses Prolific to test the quality of its AI models. The company recruits people via Prolific to participate in surveys to tell it whether an AI-generated response was a good response or a bad response.
“Increasingly, the emphasis of researchers in these large companies and labs is shifting towards alignment with human preferences and safety,” Alan Cowen, Hume’s co-founder and CEO, told CNBC.
“There’s more of an emphasize on being able to monitor things in these applications. I think we’re just seeing the very beginning of this technology being released,” he added.
“It makes sense to expect that some of the things that have long been pursued in AI — having personalised tutors and digital assistants; models that can read legal documents and revise them these, are actually coming to fruition.”
Another role placing humans at the core of AI development is prompt engineers. These are workers who figure out what text-based prompts work best to insert into the generative AI model to achieve the most optimal responses.
According to LinkedIn data released last week, there’s been a rush specifically toward jobs mentioning AI.
Job postings on LinkedIn that mention either AI or generative AI more than doubled globally between July 2021 and July 2023, according to the jobs and networking platform.
Reinforcement learning
Meanwhile, companies are also using AI to automate reviews of regulatory documentation and legal paperwork — but with human oversight.
Firms often have to scan through huge amounts of paperwork to vet potential partners and assess whether or not they can expand into certain territories.
Going through all of this paperwork can be a tedious process which workers don’t necessarily want to take on — so the ability to pass it on to an AI model becomes attractive. But, according to researchers, it still requires a human touch.
Mesh AI, a digital transformation-focused consulting firm, says that human feedback can help AI models learn mistakes they make through trial and error.
“With this approach organizations can automate analysis and tracking of their regulatory commitments,” Michael Chalmers, CEO at Mesh AI, told CNBC via email.
Small and medium-sized enterprises “can shift their focus from mundane document analysis to approving the outputs generated from said AI models and further improving them by applying reinforcement learning from human feedback.”
WATCH: Adobe CEO on new AI models, monetizing Firefly and new growth
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L) speaks with Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella after posing for a family picture with guests who attend the “Tech for Good” Summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris, on May 23, 2018.
Charles Platiau | AFP | Getty Images
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday said that as much as 30% of the company’s code is now written by artificial intelligence.
“I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella said during a conversation before a live audience with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The pair of CEOs were speaking at Meta’s inaugural LlamaCon AI developer event in Menlo Park, California. Nadella added that the amount of code being written by AI at Microsoft is going up steadily.
Nadella asked Zuckerberg how much of Meta’s code was coming from AI. Zuckerberg said he didn’t know the exact figure off the top of his head, but he said Meta is building an AI model that can in turn build future versions of the company’s Llama family of AI models.
“Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there,” Zuckerberg said.
Microsoft and Meta together employ tens of thousands of software developers, but they’re the latest companies to discuss how AI is replacing some of the work written by human software developers.
Since OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, people have turned to AI for a number of tasks, including customer service work, generating sales pitches and software development itself.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai in October said that more than 25% of new code was written by AI. Earlier this month, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told employees that they will have to prove AI cannot do a job before asking for more headcount. Similarly, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn on Monday announced in a memo that the language-teaching company will gradually turn to AI in lieu of human contractors.
Earlier this month CNBC and other outlets reported that OpenAI was in talks to acquire Windsurf, a startup with “vibe coding” software that spits out whole programs with a few words of input. The dream is that with machines helping to write code, organizations will be able to produce more and better software.
Technology
Samsung flags uncertain economic climate after smartphone, chip sales power quarterly results beat
A Waymo self-driving car, seen with a driver, stops at a red light outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Friday, March 31, 2025.
Bill Clark | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Alphabet-owned Waymo and Toyota on Tuesday announced a preliminary partnership to explore bringing robotaxi tech to personally-owned vehicles.
“The companies will explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology and Toyota’s vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles,” the two companies announced.
The companies said they aim to use the partnership to more quickly develop driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technologies for personal vehicles. Toyota is the world’s largest automaker by sales.
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said the strategic partnership could also result in the Google-owned company incorporating Toyota’s “vehicles into our ride-hailing fleet.”
The Toyota tie-up is the latest automotive partnership for Waymo.
The self-driving company has previously worked with automakers such as Jaguar Land Rover, Stellantis predecessor Fiat Chrysler, Daimler Trucks, Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler, Hyundai Motor and China’s Geely Zeekr. The partnerships, many of which touted long-term tie-ups, largely resulted in automakers producing modified vehicles for testing or for Waymo to use in its fleets.
The partnership with Toyota will not affect Waymo’s plans to deploy Hyundai and Zeekr vehicles through the Waymo One service in the future, a spokesman for the Alphabet-owned company told CNBC.
Waymo is now serving 250,000 paid rides per week, up from 200,000 in February, before Waymo opened in Austin and expanded in the San Francisco Bay Area in March. Waymo is already running its commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin regions.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noted in first-quarter earnings last week that Waymo has not entirely defined its long-term business model, and there is “future optionality around personal ownership” of vehicles equipped with Waymo’s self-driving technology.
Waymo and Toyota are not the only companies turning their focus to personally-owned autonomous vehicles. When GM announced in December that it was abandoning its Cruise robotaxi business, the company said it would instead focus on the development of autonomous systems for use in personal vehicles.
Toyota previously invested in and partnered with Tesla, Elon Musk’s automaker which now aims to compete with Waymo on driverless tech. Toyota sold the its stake in the EV maker in June 2017.
Tesla, once seen as a pioneer in self-driving tech, does not yet produce cars that are safe to use without a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at any time.
Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, criticized Waymo on a recent earnings call claiming the robotaxis are too expensive for mass-production. Musk also promised Tesla will be “selling fully autonomous rides in June in Austin,” using Model Y vehicles with a new “unsupervised” version of the company’s “Full Self-Driving” or FSD systems installed.
— CNBC reporter Michael Wayland contributed to this report.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business3 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway