A recent news shocked the world where it saw one of China’s largest media and public relations companies, Bluefocus Intelligent Communications Group Co, planning to replace its external copywriters and graphic designers with generative AI models. It’s a move which may have wider implications throughout the industry as this type of AI introduction is cause for concern regarding human job security.
An internal staff memo seen by Bloomberg revealed the plans, which read: “To embrace the new wave of AI-generated content, starting today we’ve decided to halt all spending on third-party copywriters and designers.” In response to this, the company’s shares had increased by 19% when the news were released on Thursday.
The worry surrounding this type of generative AI is not unfounded. A paper by Goldman Sachs suggested that these systems could replace a quarter of work tasks in the US and Europe, the equivalent of 300 million jobs, and cause “significant disruption” across big economies. Even more staggering is Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani’s research, which found that almost two-thirds of the US and Europe’s jobs were exposed to some degree of AI automation.
Bluefocus Intelligent Communications Group Co has already started to reach out to companies like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Baidu Inc. to explore licensing its AI technology. While this figure of work task replacements might be intimidating, the paper also had a couple of optimistic points. It suggested nearly 63% of the US workforce will remain in positions and have their job duties partially automated. This frees up workers to focus more on productive tasks, but will it be enough to calm the stunned workforce?
It might be that the public is against such technologies and the paper from Cornell University speaks to this. It showed that people do not like it if they believe they are reading material that is generated or partly generated by AI. With this in mind, the future of generative AI and its implications remain, for now at least, questionable.
