I asked ChatGPT what work it’s leaving for me. Its answers weren’t encouraging

AI taketh but also giveth. Well, giveth seemingly plausible career advice, at least

Carsten Jung, senior economist at IPPR, said: “Already existing generative AI could lead to big labour market disruption or it could hugely boost economic growth. Either way, it is set to be a gamechanger for millions of us. But technology isn’t destiny and a jobs apocalypse is not inevitable – government, employers and unions have the opportunity to make crucial design decisions now that ensure we manage this new technology well. If they don’t act soon, it may be too late.”
Richard Partington, The Guardian, 27/3/24

Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time, revealing that he had chosen his papal name because of the tech revolution. As he explained, his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality. “Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor,” Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals… The Vatican has been pushing for a binding international treaty on AI, which some tech CEOs want to avoid.
Stancati, Hinshaw, Hagey and Glazer, WSJ, 17/6/25

The utopian view of AI empowering creators by taking care of low-value tasks isn’t what’s happening: Instead, royalty-collecting society the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers estimates AI music’s growth through 2028 will come largely at the expense of humans, generating an estimated €10 billion ($18 billion) of revenue by substituting artists’ work.
Lionel Laurent, 23/6/25, SMH

Sri Annaswamy, the founder of Swamy and Associates outsourcing and analytics advisory firm, says his clients are developing agents to automate back-office processes in finance and accounting, HR and contact centres… “Client objectives [for AI agents] are fairly basic, at this stage,” Annaswamy says. They are mainly searching for productivity improvements so back-office staff time and effort is redirected to higher value tasks. “Longer term, expect clients to attempt to replace staff entirely especially with respect to back-office processes,” he says.
Tess Bennett, AFR, 25/6/25

In absolute terms, US manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. America now employs only half of that number today in 2025, even though total manufacturing output has continued to climb. This is the nature of automation. Whether or not automation ultimately creates more jobs (which is still hotly debated) the point is that your current job is toast… Now the question becomes “who does AI really benefit?” Whether it’s manufacturing or farming, if you compare white collar work to those jobs, and we can surmise that many knowledge worker jobs are going away, who really benefits?
The owners of capital of course!
David Shapiro, 25/6/25

A lot of people working on AI pretend that it's only going to be good; it's only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced. Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.
Sam Altman, The Atlantic, 26/6/25

Since late 2022, I’ve periodically asked various Large Language Model interfaces how – hypothetically speaking – an Australian content creator of a certain age might turn a dollar when ‘good enough’ content can now be generated at near-zero cost.

From memory, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and the rest invariably advised pursuing a career as an AI ethicist.

Maybe that’s what they tell everybody.

Anyway, that’s where the conversation has previously always ended, given (a) There don’t appear to be many AI ethicist jobs available (b) I don’t have the relevant qualifications or work experience and (c) I’m not much interested in becoming an ethicist. Indeed, given my shameful background as a journo, many might argue I’m the last person to be adjudicating grave moral matters.

But I recently came across a LinkedIn post that offered the following advice:

If you have seen the news lately about AI causing massive layoffs and are worried about either keeping your job or finding a job, this is my advice as someone who tests AI for a living:

1. Upload or paste your resume into ChatGPT (or your preferred chatbot). Remove all personal or confidential information.

2. Use the prompt: “Based on my resume and skills, how soon will AI take my job?”

3. Based on the AI’s response, prompt “What skills do I need to learn to pivot and future-proof my career.”

4. Start today learning those skills. (You can even ask the AI how to start learning those skills).

I’ve completed the first three steps and am working on the fourth.

Read on, dear reader, if you’re interested in the guidance ChatGPT Pro offered me.

Some things are easily automatable, some not so much
If only for the sake of entertaining blog copy, I was hoping the Chatmeister would come back with, “It’s already all over for you, buddy! Start getting used to the taste of home-brand dog food,” when I asked how long I had left before being entirely expunged from the labour market.

Disappointingly, it responded diplomatically by grouping content creator skills into two broad categories.

LOW automation risk: Content strategy and ideation; client collaboration and consulting; creative storytelling and tone automation

MODERATE automation risk: Content research and writing; subject matter expertise and research

While it can spit out passable generic copy and first drafts, ChatGPT readily confesses it “often lacks accuracy, context, and true insight [and] can mimic form but struggles with substance… Producing high-quality, insightful content still needs a human expert’s hand”. Likewise, AI is a handy research assistant but “cannot reliably conduct original research or interviews”. (Ackshually, it can do those things, at least unreliably, but let’s not get into the weeds here.)

ChatGPT even wrapped up with a gee up, informing me, “the more automatable parts of your job are the routine, lower-level tasks… However, the high-value components – strategy, original insight, creative quality, and client-centric collaboration – are far less automatable with current or even foreseeable AI tools… [AI] might nibble at the edges… but it can’t yet replicate a veteran content strategist’s output end-to-end.”

Dubious advice
I imagine most creative types would now argue AI has been doing more than nibbling at the edges. I’m also not entirely convinced many businesses will spend money on a veteran content strategist – or veteran art director, copywriter, illustrator, musician, photographer, scriptwriter, voice-over artist or videographer – when they can get ‘good enough’ content in seconds at negligible cost.

But maybe my peers and I have just been going about things incorrectly. Perhaps we should double down on our humanity and stop competing head on with Gen AI?

ChatGPT encouraged me to pursue this strategy. Along with predictable guff about needing to keep “evolving my skill set” and “delivering real value", my AI overlord made a couple of more specific suggestions.

Firstly, “In a world where a lot of content will be AI-generated and bland, having a recognizable human voice and profile becomes a huge asset.” (Looks like I will have to dispense with the anodyne prose and start saying what I really think. Consider yourself warned, dear reader.)

Secondly, it averred:

If pure writing becomes more automated, companies will still desperately need human guidance on content strategy, brand voice, and content planning. You can evolve from “writer” to content consultant or strategist – someone who audits a client’s content needs, develops editorial calendars, defines messaging guidelines, and maybe oversees a mix of human and AI content producers.

That sounded intriguing and potentially even lucrative, so I investigated further.

Surely, thousands of more prescient veteran content creators would have long ago sought to rocket up the value chain?

Here’s where things took a dispiriting turn. When I investigated whether many of my peers had done the contemporary equivalent of “learning to code”, I discovered they hadn’t. Yes, ChatGPT found a few examples of veteran content strategists who’d reinvented themselves and launched ‘AI-aware’ or ‘AI-powered’ businesses that created or edited content.

But it was slim pickings, which was hardly surprising. Not every content creator has the desire or ability to become a high-falutin’ content strategist. Rather more to the point, the handful of content creators who ascend to Chiefdom won’t be sending work to the far more numerous and ‘left behind’ Indians. They’ll generate the content solo, with the help of tools like Canva, Claude, Veo 3 and Suno.

I don’t dispute that there will be a small handful of veteran content strategists who do well for themselves. During the first white-collar bloodbath I was swept up in, a handful of entrepreneurial journalists, graphic designers, ad salespeople and media execs set up content marketing agencies. A few of those agency owners even made out like bandits.

That doesn’t change the fact that most failing-legacy-media casualties didn’t set up content agencies and didn’t make out like bandits.

Quite the opposite, in many instances.

It’s the system, maaan!
These things are difficult to quantify, but there seems to have been a vibe shift around AI in recent weeks. It appears knowledge workers are belatedly twigging that the new technology upper-management types are so obsessed with isn’t yet another overhyped Silicon Valley nothingburger.

The collection of demographics being clearly impacted by AI – grads looking for their first proper job, content creators, teachers and academics, software developers, those with admin, clerical or customer-service roles – keeps growing.

I’d be astonished if the bloody mass executions part of the much-predicted white-collar bloodbath doesn’t begin in earnest soon. It seems inevitable that the enthusiasm for vigorous headcount pruning will spread from the tech industry to other sectors of the economy within the next few months.

As many prominent individuals keep forecasting, just as much physical labour was automated away over the past 250 years, enormous amounts of cognitive labour will be automated away over the next 25 months.

The course of Anglosphere politics over the last half century suggests white-collar workers see themselves as distinct from, and morally and intellectually superior to, their blue-collar counterparts. I imagine this mindset will make it especially disorientating when they discover that their jobs can also be rapidly automated away. Just as the jobs of agricultural labourers and factory workers were in previous eras.

In the not-too-distant future, a critical mass of white-collar workers will have no option but to accept the robots really are coming for their jobs. I suspect many will look for individual solutions at that point. How could it be otherwise for those who’ve got so far by backing themselves?

For a time at least, they will pursue a cunning plan – becoming more agentic, moving up the value chain, reskilling, launching an ‘AI business’. Maybe, if things get really dire, even joining Substack in the desperate hope of one day pulling down Noah Smith-level coin.

Some will, for a time at least, be successful. Most won’t.

I fear we are all now headed for technological obsolescence, whether in the short or medium term. It’s a darkly amusing historical irony that AI is coming first for the professional-managerial class types who did so well out of neoliberalism. However, it won’t be long until robo-plumbers and hairdresser-automatons are rolling off the Tesla factory production line.

Work for humans is going away and not coming back. There aren’t going to be lots of new jobs created. Of course, some will do well in the coming years. But most won’t. I’ve learned the hard way that it’s dangerous to bet on being one of the outliers when the overall direction of travel is dire.

And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention
You don’t know what you don’t know. Few white-collar workers currently know what it’s like to wake up one day only to find your industry, job, social status and, most alarmingly of all, income has disappeared. Erstwhile magazine journalists do. One of them, Stephanie Wood, wrote a courageous and insightful article about the experience a couple of years ago.

Here’s the money quote:

I’m starting to feel as though I’m waving and running frantically after a bus vanishing into the distance. I catastrophise about my working and financial future, fear that sunset is upon me… [I’ve] run myself into the ground, mostly working from home in a lonely, multitasking, all-hours hustle – exhausting, unsustainable and a road to despair and penury. I have heard multiple other similar stories, all with their own set of circumstances, their own shades of anxiety, stress, fear, plummeting self-esteem and existential dread.

White-collar workers who aren’t former or serving members of the Fourth Estate are now getting a taste of the existential dread long familiar to we unloved and unlamented hacks. Many of them will soon embark on an exhaustingly unsustainable “all-hours hustle” to attempt to turn things around. Most of the time, it won’t end up making much difference.

The only hope now would seem to be collective action.

On which, more next week.