AI Can Make Some Jobs More Difficult and Time-Consuming — Here's How The technology streamlines tasks for some workers — and makes them completely unmanageable for others.
By Amanda Breen
Key Takeaways
- An editor and publisher had to temporarily halt magazine submissions due to the high volume of AI-generated content.
- In other industries, AI tools — and the different pace and workflow that come with them — are making tasks a lot harder.
With all the chatter about AI's potential to streamline tasks and replace workers in certain industries, there's been little said about the other side of the issue: when technology makes jobs more cumbersome.
Neil Clarke, an editor and publisher, said he recently had to pause submissions for his science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld following an avalanche of "consistently bad" AI-generated submissions, CNN reported.
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Clarke told the outlet that "volume," not "quality," is the real issue at hand. "It almost doubled our workload," he went on, noting that he and his team will likely have to shutter submissions again in the future to keep the flood of content at bay.
This massive, unchecked amount of AI-generated content is causing problems on a larger scale too: Chatbots are being deployed to create entire spam sites in a bid to draw ad revenue, The Verge reported.
In the same vein, the use of AI within the media industry has been riddled with problems too — from news outlet CNET's need to issue "substantial corrections" to the inaccurate Star Wars story published by Gizmodo, which also needed correction, per CNN.
But unwieldy content isn't the only challenge for workers navigating AI on the job.
Ivana Saula, the research director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, told CNN that workers in her union have said they feel like "guinea pigs" amid the rapid rollout of AI tools that frequently result in additional "residual tasks that a human still needs to do."
