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
China’s artificial intelligence device market is already booming, and in the advanced technology race against the U.S., the country’s expertise in hardware could give it an edge.
“The advantage comes from the fundamental root that China is a nation of manufacturing,” Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of 01.AI and chairman of Sinovation Ventures, told CNBC. “Today, the competition is on the software, the models, the agents, the applications. But soon it will move to devices.”
Meta has sold millions of its smart glasses since introducing the specs in 2023, and the Chinese have caught on, with more than 70 Chinese companies creating competing products in the space.
Eyewear from companies such as Inmo and Rokid are sold worldwide. Xiaomi and Alibaba‘s are found only in China and are embedded with the tech giants’ own AI.
Alibaba’s DingTalk, a messaging platform for the workplace, this year released a credit card-sized AI gizmo meant for note-taking on the job.
The DingTalk A1 can record, transcribe, summarize and analyze speech from as far as 8 meters (26 feet) away, about the length of a large boardroom.
The device is similar to the Plaud Note, which is available in the U.S.
The device experimentation in China spans from the practical to the unconventional.
Chinese startup Le Le Gaoshang Education Technology released a “Native Language Star” brand translating gadget aimed at Chinese parents with limited English to teach English to their own children.
The contraption, which is looped around the back of a user’s neck like a travel neck pillow and comes down toward the chest, has a sort of muzzle unit that goes over the mouth and mutes the user’s own voice.
The unit is embedded with Tencent and iFlyTek AI and is billed as a way to turn an English-speaking Chinese parent into a “laowai,” or foreigner. It retails for $420.
Having so many hardware touchpoints helps with adoption and with getting people used to the technology. It’s also a boost for companies to gather a war chest of data compared to other countries, analysts say.
“When you still hear people outside of China talking about what the future of the AI device might be, the market is full of AI devices here already,” tech consultant Tom van Dillen of Greenkern said at his office in Beijing. “This creates this feedback loop again to make the AI even better.”
Yet an edge in hardware is far from a guarantee to win the AI race, especially if China’s AI lacks appeal with global customers due to privacy or other issues, or if it falls well behind its counterparts in the U.S. or elsewhere.
“You really have to be that Apple iPhone to reap the most of the reward,” Lee cautioned, referencing late entrepreneur Steve Jobs’ invention that is often seen as one of the most transformative consumer products ever. “I think the China advantage for building the Apple iPhone for the AI age is that the capabilities are there — engineers and entrepreneurs, and so on. But it will still be a race.”
Technology
Trump greenlights Nvidia H200 AI chip sales to China if U.S. gets 25% cut, says Xi responded positively
President Donald Trump on Monday said Nvidia will be allowed to ship its H200 artificial intelligence chips to “approved customers” in China and elsewhere, on the condition that the U.S. gets a 25% cut.
Chinese President Xi Jinping “responded positively” to the proposal, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
The policy “will support American Jobs, strengthen U.S. Manufacturing, and benefit American Taxpayers,” Trump wrote.
“The Department of Commerce is finalizing the details, and the same approach will apply to AMD, Intel, and other GREAT American Companies,” he added in the post.
Both Nvidia and chip rival AMD, short for Advanced Micro Devices, agreed in August to share 15% of the revenue from China chip sales with the U.S. government. But around that same time, China reportedly warned companies against using the H20 AI chip that Nvidia designed especially for the country.
The H200 is a higher-grade chip than the H20, but not the company’s top-of-the-line product.
Nvidia shares climbed earlier Monday on news that the Commerce Department was set to approve the China sales, but later pared those gains. The stock rose about 2% after hours.
Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) stock prices
“We applaud President Trump’s decision to allow America’s chip industry to compete to support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America,” a spokesman from Nvidia told CNBC in a statement.
“Offering H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America,” the spokesman said.
Semiconductors, which are key components in nearly every category of electronics, are at the center of the AI race between the U.S. and China.
They have also played a role in the tumultuous trade relationship between the two economic superpowers.
When Beijing imposed export controls on rare-earth minerals, which are used in the production of some high-end chips, the Trump administration threatened to massively increase tariffs on U.S. imports from China.
After meeting in South Korea in late October, Trump and Xi struck a tentative trade truce in which China committed to end “retaliation” against U.S. chipmakers, according to the White House.
Trump said after that meeting that he discussed the export of Nvidia chips with Xi.
— CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos and Kif Leswing contributed to this report.
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment3 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024