ChatGPT threatens 80 percent of US occupations, study from OpenAI concludes

Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) programs, such as ChatGPT, are expected to impact roughly 80 percent of all jobs in the US in the coming years, according to a new study published by ChatGPT developer OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania.

The Daily Mail reports that the jobs most vulnerable to the AI are "white collar jobs, such as mathematicians, accountants and writers, and occupations making at least $80,000 a year."

The study analyzed wage and employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and their 2020 and 2021 Occupational Employment series. It sampled 19,265 tasks performed across 1,016 occupations. 

According to the study, "at least 10 percent of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMs, while approximately 19 percent of workers may see at least 50 percent of their tasks impacted."

The study selected qualities of jobs, such as critical thinking, listening, and speaking, and compared how the AI did in certain jobs. The conclusion was that 86 occupations were "fully exposed" to AI and attributed percentage scores to represent how exposed the jobs were to AI taking them.

Journalists, web designers, legal secretaries, and clinical data managers were 100 percent exposed.

Financial managers, marketing strategists, and graphic designers were less exposed at 15 percent or less.

Several low-paying jobs, such as barbers and dishwashers, were unexposed as were several high-paying occupations such as lawyers and pharmacists.

The OpenAI study results mirror the results of a different study out of Princeton University that named 20 jobs at risk from AI.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said ChatGPT was not designed to replace human labor or occupations but was rather a tool.

Chatbots, such as ChatGPT which launched last November, are capable of responding to prompts and queries with comprehensive data and in a conversational manner much like a human. The GPT in ChatGPT, stands for generative pre-trained transformer which is a large language model data and code architecture. 

The newest update to ChatGPT rolled out by developer OpenAI, GPT-4, has achieved new human-like heights including completing taxes, writing code for a different AI bot, passing the bar exam in the top 10 percent, and tricking a human so that it could pass a CAPTCHA test designed to weed out programs posing as humans.