At a time when many people are struggling to make ends meet, the threat of being replaced by an AI like ChatGPT is particularly troubling. While there are jobs that humans should not be allowed to do (jobs that can be taken away by AI), no one wants to see people's livelihoods disappear. Chinese media giant Blue Focus disagrees.

The company, valued at $3 billion, contacted Chinese AI leaders Alibaba and Baidu. Alibaba and Baidu have their own independent models known as Tongyi Qianwen and Ernie, respectively. We're used to some jobs being automated, but the one at risk this time is the job usually considered irreplaceable by machines: writers. Uh oh.

An internal memo obtained by Bloomberg states, "To accommodate the new wave of AI-generated content, we have decided to stop all spending on third-party copywriters and designers starting today. Worryingly for those in the design and copywriting industry, Blue Focus' stock price actually rose 19% when the memo announcing its decision to stop using human contractors was released.

AI art is the most obvious risk for the creative industry, with issues surrounding fair use and artistic merit, but it is not the only one. Earlier this year, Google revealed that it had developed an AI that can create music of any genre using only text prompts.

The written word is also at risk. Copywriters are responsible for some of the most iconic phrases in human history, and top copywriters are getting paid big bucks; Blue Focus, with clients like BMW and Samsung, is working on a very prominent campaign. Having worked as a copywriter in a previous job, I wanted to try out AI (in this case ChatGPT).

The results were rather lackluster and generic, but the worrying thing is that AI technology is constantly learning and improving. For now, the ways in which AI like ChatGPT and Google Bard draw from existing online content make it difficult to see them as truly creative, and there is also the risk of accidental plagiarism.

On the other hand, AI is also creating jobs, with so-called "prompt engineers" earning big money, while some websites are selling original AI prompts in eBay-like formats. Future artists and writers may need a background in coding and programming. At the very least, we can agree that the world will always need tech journalists.