OpenAI's ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI could be coming to take our jobs.
Since its release in November of last year, the impressive AI chatbot has been used to write cover letters, create a children's book, and even help students cheat on their essays.
The chatbot may be more powerful than we ever imagined. Google found that, in theory, the search engine would hire the bot as an entry-level coder if it interviewed at the company. Amazon employees who tested ChatGPT said that the chatbot does a "very good job" at answering customer support questions, is "great" at making training documents, and is "very strong" at answering queries around corporate strategy.
ChatGPT, however, isn't perfect. Users of ChatGPT found that the bot can generate misinformation, incorrectly answer coding problems, and produce errors in basic math.
"AI will never be as good as the best experts in a field,"one Wharton business school professor said.
But despite its flaws, the rise of ChatGPT has sparked debates over whether it will replace jobs.
The conversation on whether AI will automate jobs is nothing new. A 2013 University of Oxford study found that 47% of US jobs could be eliminated by AI over the next 20 years. While this prediction appears to have been off-base, the idea that emerging AI technologies like ChatGPT could infringe on people's jobs — especially white-collar ones — is becoming an even more tangible reality, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who has researched AI's impact on the American workforce, told Insider.
"It has really captured people's imaginations and made tangible how this could play out," Muro said.
While Muro doesn't think that AI will replace millions of jobs anytime soon, he said that white-collar workers "appear to be more exposed to these technologies" than blue-collar workers and may be required to use AI to help do their jobs in the near future.
Anu Madgavkar, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, an economic research hub, agrees. Human judgement still needs to be applied to these technologies to avoid error and bias, she told Insider.
"We have to think about these things as productivity enhancing tools, as opposed to complete replacements," Madgavkar said.
Still, Muro expects that AI will only get cheaper and become more advanced in the future, which could potentially disrupt white-collar work as we know it.
Insider talked to experts and conducted research to compile a list of jobs that are at highest-risk for replacement by AI.
Here are the 10 jobs that AI may replace, based on our research.