By ASDF
Published on March 26, 2025
Everything has Artificial Intelligence (AI) these days. Every major company is scrambling to add AI in some way or another to their products. However, most people are not thinking of the right thing when they hear AI. In order to understand if AI will take over jobs, it is necessary to examine what an AI is, what one can do, and what one cannot do.
Currently, there is no real AI that exists. The common thing people think of when they hear AI are things like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot. These are not AIs, these are Large Language Models, or LLMs. What is an actual AI then? A real AI, also referred to as General Artificial Intelligence (GAI), has to have the ability to have its own thoughts. The LLMs never come up with their own ideas, they just compare the prompt that was given to its existing datasets and just parrot other information it already had back to the user. These datasets are often large and pull from info all across the internet. ChatGPT, for example, was trained on the dataset referred to as the Common Crawl dataset. This dataset is archives of a large portion of the internet, as well as written books, songs, etc.
So, is there any threat to jobs being taken over by one of these LLMs? Depending on where you look, your answer will vary. According to Bernard Marr, strategic business consultant and YouTuber, he estimates roughly 85 million jobs will be altered or completely taken over by a LLM, but this will also bring about 97 million new jobs, along the lines of LLM programmers and trainers (Marr). Tianqi Sun, however, has another view on things. He has seen many cases where a LLM was given a job, and it failed its task miserably. Most notably, he saw an instance in which a lawyer was using a LLM to create an argument in court and the LLM tried to cite a nonexistent case from the past (Sun). There are quite a few jobs, however, that have already started being taken over by these models. For example, a lot of customer support agencies now use chatbots of some sort, whether it be on the support page on a website, or an “AI powered” phone support line. Other examples of jobs that are likely going to be turned over to an automated system would be tasks that are very repetitive, including things like data processing, data analysis, and payroll tracking.
There are some jobs that these systems will never be able to take over though. Sophia Adams via Gaper.io says that there are many jobs that require the emotional touch and human interaction that a computer program will never be able to replicate. These jobs include doctors, healthcare professionals, teachers, or nannies (Adams). Another example would be things that require multitasking. Recently McDonalds partnered with IBM to try to automate their drive-thru systems, using a LLM to take orders and relay them to the kitchen. This experiment lasted only a few months, and in that time the model managed to give away thousands of dollars in free food, as well as mess up numerous orders.
There are many ways companies are trying to compete with each other in the space of “AI”, but it will never completely take over the workforce. What should be focused on more is what kind of regulations will be put in place to not let these LLMs get out of hand. A lot of people are worried about how fast the models intelligence has increased over a short period of time, and that there are no rules in place of these things yet. To quote Nick Bilton, NYTimes author, “The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.”
Adams, Sophia. “15 Jobs Will AI Replace by 2030?” Hire Remote Developers | Build Teams in 24 Hours - Gaper.Io, 1 Oct. 2024, gaper.io/15-jobs-will-ai-replace-by-2030/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.
“Is Ai Taking over the Job Market?” Michigan Journal of Economics, 3 Jan. 2024, sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2024/01/03/is-ai-taking-over-the-job-market/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.
Lutkevich, Ben. “Will AI Replace Jobs? 17 Job Types That Might Be Affected.” WhatIs, TechTarget, 4 Nov. 2024, www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Will-AI-replace-jobs-9-job-types-that-might-be-affected. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.
Marr, Bernard. “Hype or Reality: Will Ai Really Take over Your Job?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 2 July 2024, www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/05/15/hype-or-reality-will-ai-really-take-over-your-job/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.
Rogers, Kate. “McDonald’s to End Ai Drive-Thru Test with IBM.” CNBC, 18 June 2024, www.cnbc.com/2024/06/17/mcdonalds-to-end-ibm-ai-drive-thru-test.html. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.
What Is an LLM (Large Language Model)? | Cloudflare, www.cloudflare.com/learning/ai/what-is-large-language-model/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.
What Is LLM? - Large Language Models Explained - AWS, aws.amazon.com/what-is/large-language-model/. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.
“What Jobs Will AI Replace?” Built In, builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-replacing-jobs-creating-jobs. Accessed 23 Mar. 2025.