Will AI take my job?

A real fear from a real person who needs to earn a real-life income.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard someone say “I can do that with AI” in the last 18 months. With a few cleverly tailored prompts it seems you can attempt to mimic the skills of just about anyone, from lawyers to musicians to designers. It got me thinking…

Will AI eventually replace my job?

This is a question that many in the creative field are asking. With a creative economy of around half a million people in Australia, we’re talking about the livelihood and validity of many  skilled people who are very worried that their income is in jeopardy. If you’re one of them, read on and hopefully you can breathe a sigh of relief at the end of this.

AI is constantly evolving and adapting to meet the needs of people who want faster, easier solutions. This blog isn’t an AI witch hunt. I’m pro-AI. The AI landscape is enormous and filled with genuinely life-changing advancements, particularly in healthcare, finance, retail and manufacturing. Most of that has nothing to do with my day-to-day job, but it will absolutely benefit my life.

Then there’s the other end of AI, the tools most of us interact with: LLMs like ChatGPT and generative features baked into everyday software. From summarising long documents to drafting emails, they’re becoming the default shortcut.

But is the convenience worth the cost? And are we losing the art of thought leadership in the process?

I told a friend that I was writing this, and she sent me a blog written by best-selling author Tim Duggan titled ‘Stop the Slop – How to actively fight against AI-generated slop that’s taking over the internet.’ Tim is another creative who is hyper aware of the toll AI is having on the creative industry. Like Tim I believe that AI is a useful and powerful tool but not a replacement for creatives like ourselves.

LLMs can enhance thought leadership. They don’t replace it.

LLMs like Gemini and ChatGPT are certainly useful tools. They can reference previously explored strategies and offer useful templates to follow. What was once a guarded space is now on display for the world to see. It is levelling the playing field and educating those who are willing to learn rather than copy.

I’m not against this.

Shared knowledge is how we innovate and solve problems faster. In that respect LLMs are a very useful tool but they are only as good as the person using them. They can inspire the seed of an idea but not generate an original one. It’s the critical thinking required to weave knowledge into something unique and creative that is missing. Critical thinking is the human process of using lived experience, empathy, moral judgement and logic to generate tailored solutions to a unique problem rather than accept something on face value. AI doesn’t own this space. Living, thinking, emotional humans do.

Don’t get ‘sloppy’ like everyone else. It’s what they want.

As Tim describes so elegantly in his blog, AI slop is just that. Slop is the regurgitated, low quality, often inaccurate digital content produced by LLMs and generative tools (although Photoshop is getting better at limiting the number of fingers to 5 on each hand…). And while these systems can summarise theories, pull article references and produce documents that make you look ahh-mazing, how confident can we really be in the validity or originality of what they generate? As AI slop becomes more apparent, there will be a manual process required to check whether the output is accurate. Take a closer look at the AI generated feature image of this article for example.

Images, music and words are now spat out in minutes, often with little care, thought or imagination, yet presented as original work. This kind of AI use is making us sloppy, even a little ‘dumb’, and it undermines entire creative industries whose work has quietly been fed into the machine. It’s a problem, which is why we’re seeing the government reject calls to introduce a text and datamining exemption for tech giants.

And why is big tech asking for exemptions?

Monetisation.

Companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon have backed AI infrastructure to the tune of $US700 billion in cash they pull in yearly. This kind of backing needs to turn a profit, which is why we’re seeing AI generative tools injected into almost every piece of software we use. While this represents only a small slice of AI’s overall capability, it is the part most people interact with. At scale, LLMs and generative features become accessible to everyone.

As a design studio, we use Adobe daily and have noticed a significant push in AI capability. Probably due to the $5 billion in annual recurring revenue they make from AI products. While some of the generative tools are valuable, some are just lazy. I mean, who is buying Adobe credits to have AI add bleed to an illustrator canvas? Come on!! The truth is that big tech relies on you to be ‘sloppy’ to turn a profit.

Do I think AI will eventually replace my job? Not exactly.

All is not lost for the creative industry. Although elements of my work function will be expedited with AI tools, it’s thought leadership and originality I’m being paid for. And that can’t be synthesised.

My knowledge of how to use these tools with originality and purpose is what will keep me employed. It’s another tool in the belt. We just need to use some of that creativity to think outside the box. It’s what we’re good at after all.

** Side note. The feature image is Ai generated.

Stay sharp, stay smart. — The Hello Mellow Team

This blog was written by Ness Kelly design director at Hello Mellow.