There has been a lot of talk for a while now about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can replace professionals in their jobs, but what happens when workers use AI to cover more tasks and earn more money? This is the case of the “overemployed”, a community of multi-job people who have begun to use the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to execute as many tasks as they are capable of covering.
Several American media outlets echo this trend, illustrating it with real examples. According to a report published by Vice’s Motherboard, Ben, one of these workers, helps fintech companies bring new products to market, which involves writing reports, storyboards and presentations, among other things. He started using ChatGPT a while ago to be able to cover all the tasks of his multi-job, which has made his job much easier. In fact, according to him, ChatGPT does about 80% of his work, which allows him to take on more responsibilities in his various jobs. “Not a little easier,” he says, “but a hell of a lot easier.”
When one of Ben’s bosses asks him to create a story to promote a product, Ben explains the context and provides a template to ChatGPT, which creates an outline for him and helps him conceptualize the work. He also sometimes asks her to compose responses to Slack messages from his boss and to transcribe Zoom meetings. It saves a lot of time.
For many workers, AI has been a key tool in juggling multitasking. According to Charles, who has worked as a software engineer and product manager and solutions architect, AI tools have made it possible for him to handle all tasks. For example, he has outsourced writing tasks to AI tools, such as writing a memo to defend and justify a business decision. “AI has changed the way we work,” says Charles. “It has allowed us to be more efficient and productive.”
AI has revolutionized the job market, and its impact is being felt across many industries. According to a study by OpenAI researchers, the release of ChatGPT-4, OpenAI’s most advanced language model, will affect thousands of jobs around the world. Some companies have already started using AI to perform tasks that were previously performed by humans, such as writing emails or generating reports.
However, the multitasking trend has also been fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has accelerated the adoption of remote work. The combination of telecommuting and tools like ChatGPT has allowed workers to cover more tasks and juggle attending all the video conferences or responding to the bosses of the different companies.
In fact, in Spain there are already companies in which the use of AI has had a forceful impact, as is the case of Domestika, which broke the news a few weeks ago that it was preparing a staff snip with the premise that, by At least a part of the positions could be filled with AI. The question that many are asking now is what if AI contributes to employees becoming “overemployed”?
The key to this new way of working lies in the combination of teleworking and tools like ChatGPT. But this also raises the question of whether workers will be willing to continue working under these conditions, sometimes even combining different time zones.
“Five jobs would be an exaggeration.” The phrase is from another of the professionals Vice spoke with, a worker in the technology sector who lives in Ohio and was already juggling two jobs. Thanks to ChatGPT he multiplied that number by two. The publication talks about the use of ChatGPT to respond to messages from Slack (an online tool popular among companies that have implemented teleworking), the transcription of meetings or the preparation of emails, which is being used by a US engineer who is combining two positions that require him to attend to different time zones: Pacific time and UK time.
“The best assistant.” “I’m a very conceptual person. I love that my brain takes care of that. But the first draft of anything almost always goes through GPT,” explains a professor from the United Kingdom who also runs a digital marketing agency and a startup. “It’s the best assistant there is,” he stresses before confessing that the bot helps him generate business plans, publications or Excel spreadsheets. In percentage terms, the OpenAI tool would take over 80% of the preliminary tasks. The final contribution corresponds to him.
Vice even talks about a young man from the FIRE movement (acronym for “Financial Independence, Retire Early”), who claims to earn $500,000 with two jobs and hopes to add another $300,000 to that figure with a third position. He uses ChatGPT at work, has outsourced coding tasks in the past, and is now looking for a way to offshore some of his load to an employee in India.
Efficiency is the key. It may be striking, but the truth is that there are already studies that reflect the extent to which a worker can gain efficiency with the use of AI. At MIT they have carried out an interesting experiment with ChatGPT which, broadly speaking, showed that workers who relied on the OpenAI tool were 59% more productive: they took 17 minutes to complete a task than their peers, without the support of the AI, he had 27.
The most curious thing about the experiment is that this greater speed did not translate into a decrease in quality. On the contrary. Those who evaluated their works assigned them a 4.5 out of 7, almost one point above the 3.8 with which tasks without AI were rated. The test, yes, was carried out with a very specific type of activity and role.