When the World Economic Forum predicted a few years ago that artificial intelligence would cause seven million job losses, the great and the good of Davos were able to wring their hands about the human cost of progress while feeling certain that they would be left unscathed. Automation might, they believed, take out office drones and administrative roles but not management gurus or software engineers.
That comfy confidence has been shaken in recent months by a new wave of “generative AI” tools. Apps that can create pictures, video or prose good enough to pass as authentically human. At the moment one in particular has captivated Silicon Valley. Hailed as the smartest chatbot ever made, ChatGPT can generate high-school essays, software code or marketing strategies within seconds, all from a few words of a “prompt”. Social media timelines have been filling up with people trying out the technology. “This used to be my job,” tweeted one former Meta manager, after ChatGPT had churned out a plausible take on Instagram’s product road map.
ChatGPT’s results are not always reliable or accurate. Nonetheless, all of a sudden, AI has the creative classes and middle-management squarely in its sights. But fear not, Davos-goers. The WEF predicted that AI would not only kill jobs but create them. And one such role that has emerged with the rise of generative AI is the “prompt engineer”.
