AI and employment: Is ChatGPT Coming for Entry-Level Jobs?

04.09.2023 - 15:33 / tech.hindustantimes.com / Ai

The first years of my career in media were spent making photocopies, collecting faxes and filing papers. I also opened reader mail, took notes on meetings and ran errands for my bosses — picking up everything from skim lattes to control-top Donna Karan tights.

I've been thinking back to those dues-paying days recently due to an onslaught of depressing research about how generative AI, the technology that includes image and text creation tools like ChatGPT, could hurt the career prospects of Gen Z. If it transforms or even takes over typical entry-level tasks in professional occupations — building spreadsheets, writing first drafts or creating presentations — what will happen to jobs for younger workers?

At first blush, the outlook is bleak. Long before generative AI was a buzzword, entry-level jobs were becoming tougher to land. The Great Recession caused a spike in the un- and under-employment rate for recent graduates. Younger workers have smaller networks, which makes job-searching tougher.

And many employers have simply decided they don't want to bother with brand-new workers. A 2018 analysis of almost 100,000 job postings found that most “entry-level” jobs required three or more years of experience. Employers don't want to invest time and money in training. That's short-sighted, but it's a trend entry-level workers have been fighting for decades.

Some say that AI will compound these problems. Not only will there be fewer professional jobs to go around, but as more of those tasks are automated, young workers will miss out on learning opportunities and fail to build the skills they need to advance.

It's a fair concern, but it's probably too gloomy. “I don't buy the doomsday scenarios at all,” says Amit Joshi, a professor who studies artificial intelligence at IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. He says it's more likely that AI will raise the benchmark for what an entry-level worker can achieve. Instead of taking a week to analyze and summarize 50 academic papers, a research assistant using ChatGPT might only need a day to synthesize the core points and check for errors.

Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, agrees. “For young people, what you're going to see is that they're going to be able to perform better at their jobs. They're going to be able to contribute more.” It's not only that a PowerPoint that used to take four hours to build might now be completed in an hour. It's that the young workers who struggled with basic writing and coding will now have a tool that helps them get to a higher minimum standard.

If entry-level workers get that much faster and better, won't companies be able to get by with fewer of them? Maybe. Those are among the reasons that studies from Pew and