This will come as a surprise.

There is plenty of fearmongering around Generative AI and ChatGPT taking jobs from hard-working, knowledge-economy peeps. The good news is that the job that Generative AI is going to take is probably not yours or mine. I get asked this question often, and many of you who have been studying with me will recall me saying that the job I think that will be in the firing line will be the data scientist. As it turns out, the lazy ones are right in the firing line. I’ll talk a little more about this further down.

I believe that rather than being in the firing line, content creators will likely flourish. Remember when the internet first started gaining traction, and we were all being told how we were getting closer to the ‘paper-less office’. What in fact happened; we gained the ability to access so much more information and we could generate reports quickly. What did we do? In the absence of easy ways of sharing all of this new data, we of course printed them out!

So let’s get back to talking about these data scientists.

In the mid-2010s, there were true data scientists (and still are) who could take billions of rows of data and generate valuable, useful insights from it.

The jobs that Generative AI technology “is taking” are in the lazy data science camp. Let me explain this a little better. In the 2010s, we saw massive amounts of new data being released online, thanks to increases in processing power and innovations like Amazon’s AWS infrastructure, and a booming ecosystem of connected devices. There was too much data for data scientists to handle, giving rise to a new class of data scientists who know SQL or Python, and can game the system and generate $100K plus salaries for doing simple things that machines could automate.

Getting the picture? And, AI does it almost instantaneously.

The Creator Economy

News Flash! all Generative AI does is automate the creation of content. So, if your job is in the creator economy, and if you’re not very good at it, the news is probably not good I am sorry to say.

Content creators who are creating original content at the individual level in the form of words, music, film, art, and even food and crafts are running businesses that are more creativity-based than product-based. They target an audience as opposed to customers, and they generate revenue from the attention of that audience.

However, people who discuss and critique content, people who create low-quality and easily replicated content looking for customers and subscribers are most in danger.

So, there it is… I think the lesson here is to remain original and, create actual value. Use the technology to help you solve problems and create actual value…