9 Ways AI Could Impact Your Job (And Life) Right Now

From your banking app to your web browser, artificial intelligence (AI) is on the way to becoming an essential aspect of just about every program, service, or app you use.

But while many experts praise the perks of AI, there are also some major drawbacks to the emerging technology — many of which are already impacting the job market and lives across the country.

Here are some of the ways AI technology is negatively our lives and jobs. Knowing about these issues can help you protect your financial fitness.

Plagiarism is nothing new, of course. But thanks to tools like ChatGPT, it’s now easier — and cheaper — than ever to produce content, reports, and all kinds of information and pass it along as thought-out work and research, which can be a dangerous thing. 

According to a poll conducted by The Stanford Daily in January 2023, 17% of students at Stanford had used ChatGPT in an academic capacity. And while most students said they used the tool to brainstorm, 5% admitted to submitting AI-generated content for a class assignment.

Dishonest students and workers who use ChatGPT to get an unfair advantage are unlikely to be great hires or bring good value to businesses from all kinds of industries in America.

Technology is only as unbiased as the humans who build it — which is another way of saying it isn’t objective at all.

For instance, generative AI learns from the material it was trained on. So, the biases built into our current social systems are reflected in what AI can produce.

That bias can quickly become a problem for companies using AI and employers who start relying on it to produce their work. 

Generative AI — which produces content such as text and images — doesn’t actually create something from nothing. Instead, it learns patterns and creates something new based on these patterns.

For example, generative AI can consume vast amounts of data and then give predictive answers to questions based on the rules it learned from what it consumed. 

But real humans often crafted the materials these AI tools consume. And those human creators might not have given tech companies permission to train AI tools on the creators’ works.

Last year’s writer’s strike — which focused largely on the use of AI in the film industry — shut down Hollywood for months on end, impacting the entertainment industry immensely. 

Studios eventually largely met strikers’ demands for protections against AI. However, the five-month strike could foreshadow bigger problems down the road in industries beyond Hollywood.

Now, other industries are just as susceptible to strikes, salary cuts, and other disruptive consequences of AI's implementation into businesses of all sorts. 

It's worrisome to think of AI tools that may use datasets that include content you have personally posted online, From Facebook posts to Reddit comments.

Especially considering most job applications are filled out online, and so much of our lives happens through the internet, from medical insurance to bank account management.

If you are uncomfortable with that, there is not much you can do for now besides making your social accounts private. Of course, that defeats the purpose of maintaining a Facebook page for your small local restaurant or freelance business.

Generative AI doesn’t think for itself. All it knows is the information it’s been fed — even if that information isn’t accurate. That means the answers the AI tool produces won’t always be accurate, either.

Google’s new AI Overviews tool has already hammered this point home by recommending readers eat a rock a day. That suggestion was based on tongue-in-cheek “advice” from the satirical publication The Onion.

If Google doesn’t sort out its AI issues soon, it will be harder than ever to distinguish between truth and lies online — including about matters related to businesses and their customers.

Generative AI is increasingly used to create and edit content. That could be bad news for writers, including copywriters and authors of other materials.

AI also is making its presence felt in journalism. While the technology can be used as a tool in reporting, some critics worry that it could replace reporters altogether.

It’s always been wise to take passionate user reviews with a grain of salt. But at least in the past, you could usually count on the fact that the writer was a real person who had an experience with a product or service.

That is not necessarily the case anymore: Research from Yale University shows that readers are already unable to distinguish between AI-generated and human-written Yelp-style reviews.

Odds are you already struggle to reach a real human whenever you call a customer service line. And that trend might get worse thanks to AI.

As more companies incorporate AI technology and replace live agents with chatbots, navigating the customer service telephone tree could become even more frustrating.

If you are wary of AI, you are not alone. Plenty of AI-related lawsuits are already working their way through the courts.

No matter how those cases play out, the end result will hopefully be a clear set of laws that can help people get ahead financially instead of taking steps back as we make sense of AI’s role going forward.

In the meantime, AI has the potential to ruin many aspects of the job market. So, exercise care when dealing with businesses, both in terms of jobs and from a consumer perspective.