🌐 How will AI reshape remote work? | Ep24 OoO

😲 Business Standard: The Paid Version of ChatGPT

⚖️ CBS News: ChatGPT Passes Law Exams

👩🏽‍🎓 GovTech: Ban or Harness ChatGPT in Schools?

😒 Time Magazine: Kenyan Workers Exploited by OpenAI

Hey, Welcome Back!

It’s the second part of our deep dive into AI, and how it will affect remote workers everywhere. Last week, we launched a real-world test to see if ChatGPT could write this show. Hint: It really couldn’t.

The jokes were bad, the script was repetitive, and it lacked the nuances that make human writing so relatable. Catch it here if you missed it.

It’s episode 24, and this one really gets to the meat and potatoes. I’m going to answer those crucial questions that will help you navigate AI as a remote worker in the coming months.

Let’s plug in –

The Future of Work: AI Learns to Walk

As I mentioned last week, we recognize that AI has been born, but it’s still a bit shaky on its legs – like a toddler learning to walk. The TL:DR version is that 2022 was for AI what 1999 was for the internet. We really have no concept of what is coming.

We do know that anyone who judged the internet’s value based on what was possible in 1999, would have been a fool. The same applies now.

So, I’m looking ahead to discover clues that might tell us what the future holds for ChatGPT.

The 4 headlines that jumped out at me 

OpenAI to soon monetize ChatGPT platform with a paid professional version

The next logical step for ChatGPT is making money, so it’s surprising for literally no-one that they have recently announced a paid version – ChatGPT Plus.

It’s going to be available for $20.00 a month and promises no down time. Aside from the cursed name choice, we’re hopeful it works.

Microsoft is also giving OpenAI a sweet 10-billion-dollar cash injection to keep its growth on track.

ChatGPT bot passes law school exam

🧠 The second headline is a nod to what we already know: this bot is smart.

It may not be smart enough to write this show yet, or pass the bar exam, but it’s walking the path.

The article speaks about how ChatGPT answered 95 multiple choice and 12 essay questions to gain acceptance into Minnesota University Law School.  

Moneywatch reports,

In a white paper titled "ChatGPT goes to law school" published on Monday, he and his coauthors reported that the bot scored a C+ overall.

🔎 This reveals the single most powerful thing about ChatGPT: instant research.

Which indirectly equals instant subject matter expertise.

Remember that scene in the Matrix when Trinity needs to fly a helicopter? She just downloads the skill, and it’s instantly available to her. We’ll probably never be able to do that, but AI already can.

The internet hosts the world’s information, so it can get thousands of hours of research in a fraction of a second. That’s formidable. So formidable that it threatens Google. Their mission is to organize the world’s information - they built a trillion-dollar empire off that.

🤖 ChatGPT is the biggest threat to their empire that they’ve ever faced.

Forget organizing the world’s information, AI can create the world’s information. You won’t have to scan search results to find the closest match based on millions of already-written pages.

You’ll just get one webpage. Curated for you, brimming with insights you actually need. It ignores the rest. Think about it! That would revolutionize tech support.

How many times have you trawled forums where people have listed similar but non-identical issues? Or chatted with reps who don’t understand the problem, never mind the solution?

Wasting time researching and troubleshooting doesn’t help anyone. Especially when the main aim is to close the ticket as soon as possible.

Imagine if that agent could:

🤔 Recall every support ticket ever created

📝 Write personalized responses

📊 Identify new trends

🎯 Autonomously implement process improvements

Everybody would be better off!

Or would they? The education sector doesn’t think so.

🤥 Schools from France to Australia seem to be living through a nightmare. How do they stop students from faking assignments and cheating on exams using ChatGPT?

One particular headline caught my eye.

Opinion: ChatGPT Should Be Harnessed, Not Banned

Eureka, right!

Now, I understand why they want to ban tools like ChatGPT. They inspire a lot of cheating. But it reminds me of when I was in high school, and teachers would say that we couldn’t use the internet to do research for our assignments.

Back then, we had to use the school library and memorize facts I’ve long since forgotten. Otherwise, we were cheating. I used to wonder why we had to memorize things that were readily available.

Even Einstein said, “never memorize something you can look up.”

Angela Duckworth and Lyle Ungar, reporting for the Los Angeles Times have a point.

 “AI models could be to essay writing what calculators are to calculus,” and also, “knowing and thinking are not the same thing.”

Surely shortcuts in knowing, promote faster thinking? When the world’s information is at our fingertips it doesn’t matter how much you’ve memorized.

What matters is:

🕵🏻 Harnessing technology to find the information

🧩 Applying critical reasoning to filter the results to create something actionable

Schools would be better off teaching that. Those are the skills that will keep you safe if AI advances start encroaching on your job.

And the last headline for this week from Time Magazine:

Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic

💪🏾 Making AI smart still takes a lot of manpower.

A huge challenge is teaching it to understand complex social dynamics – like when something is appropriate or offensive.

When the internet is your input, your output can be pretty horrendous. From hate speech to violence and sexual abuse – the only way to fix it is to teach the AI what offensive looks like.

OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, partnered with a company named Sama to do just that. Sama outsourced the work to people in Kenya, India and Uganda. It would take thousands of hours to train the program on what was ok and what was not.

Two issues immediately arose:

• The workers were subjected to horrific trauma, necessary for the greater good
• OpenAI gave Sama $12.50 an hour, but Sama gave their workers $1.32 an hour

That’s exploitation plain and simple, especially when the work is trauma-inducing. When this came to light, OpenAI cancelled their deal with Sama 8 months earlier than planned.

So what do these headlines mean for us as remote workers and how can we use this information to our advantage?

Here are some practical insights:

1. Use ChatGPT Often

👨‍💻 You’re not too cool for ChatGPT. You owe it to your future self to understand AI now and to start using it early. Remember the Matrix!

2. Enhance Your Research

📝 The next time you have a topic to research, use ChatGPT to generate a first draft.

As long as your topic is older than 2021, it will feel like downloading instant expertise. This is fantastic if your job involves longform writing, like user guides – but use it for personal stuff too like vacation research.

3. Improve Your English

📖 ChatGPT is great if you’re not a confident English writer or speaker. Its complex prompts will help you improve your tone and structure. That means more dynamic writing that sounds natural and appears concise (or whatever prompt you’d prefer).

My personal favorite is framing topics to fit a structure like the ‘problem-solution’ framework.

If you recruit people, these next tips are for you:

4. Stop Asking for Cover Letters

😳 Cover letters are the worst.

Stop asking for them! Just assume that any you receive were written by ChatGPT. My friend who created his cover letters this way, got the job.

5. Hire for Aptitude Not Skills

🦸🏾‍♀️ Having or claiming to have skills doesn’t make anyone good at their job.

Remember that knowing and thinking are not the same thing. When you hire someone with the right aptitude and attitude – it doesn’t matter if they don’t have the experience in a specific language or industry. They will learn on the job, and soon run circles around people who have knowledge, but not aptitude.

That’s right, soft skills over hard skills – always!

6. Invest in Testing & Automation

🤹‍♂️ It’s HARD to test for soft skills, and some existing methods need tighter controls to prevent fraud. Traditional recruiting methods are becoming less reliable now that bad eggs can use AI to exploit the loopholes. Your recruitment processes need to be sophisticated enough to identify skills that matter, verify them, and prevent cheating.

7. Prevent Worker Exploitation!

⚠️ What happened to those workers in Kenya is a warning for us all.

AI is maturing, but it still needs human power to be smart. While pay is globalizing – overseas workers still get taken for a ride.

There’s no easy fix for this, but companies like Crossover try to be part of the solution by setting a flat pay model upfront.

Every worker gets equal pay for equal work, regardless of where they live. We advertise the pay for every role we offer because secrecy breeds exploitation.

There is no room here for the kind of duplicity that screwed over OpenAI and the people in Kenya that were doing their dirty work. It’s up to all of us to promote workplace pay transparency.

So now I want to know: should recruiters ban or allow tools like ChatGPT?

🎤 Drop me some insight in the comments!

That’s it until next Thursday and remember the future of work is AI 😏

Andrew

This Week’s Shareable

• Are you a remote worker? Start using ChatGPT, today. Do yourself a favor and stay ahead of the massive change currently happening in the world. Learn how to harness AI, and it will never threaten your career. Find out more on OOO episode 24 this week: part 2 on how AI is reshaping remote work. #AI #remotework

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