Bruce Whitehead: AI is coming for your job.. and your content
Experts are queueing up to warn that the UK government’s November budget is going to be very difficult. Sluggish growth and long-term Brexit effects will make it hard for the Chancellor to meet her pledge to balance tax revenue and expenditure.
A big plank of her financial plan is the hope that so-called artificial intelligence will create jobs and boost the economy by increasing productivity, generating more investment and more employee spending.
But the Bank of England, which sets UK interest rates has warned of an AI “bubble”, much like the “dot com” bubble, where massively over-valued stocks crashed and sparked a wider recession.
And there are signs that any productivity increase comes at the expense of jobs, as AI is often used not to provide more jobs, but to make existing workers do more for less. The Boston Consulting Group found that rather than boosting productivity, 51 per cent of UK firms plan to “re-direct investment from staff to AI”.
King’s College London researchers say AI-dependent firms became 16.3 per cent less likely to hire than others, with software engineers and data analysts facing steepest job cuts. And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says 95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return from their investments in generative AI.
Last month STV, which paid £1m in bosses’ bonuses last year, said it would sack 60 journalists and other staff working on news programmes serving north east Scotland, and Sky is also axing thousands of UK staff including Scotland – only possible because AI will be used to fill staffing gaps. Daily Record and Mirror publisher Reach also announced around 300 redundancies.
AI works by stealing journalists’ content to “train” BOTs, using vast servers to spew out copycat material for profit, but the big tech owners want it for nothing.
Last week Bridget Jones director Baroness Kidron told Edinburgh journalists that it was time to fight back: “I'd like to see the NUJ take some cases against the companies and government for failing [them]. We need a bit of radicalism here. A little guerrilla tactics wouldn't go amiss.”