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How robotization will change the mass media market, how to prepare for these changes, and what does the unconditional basic income have to do with it?
About the Author: Valery Sidorenko, CEO of the Interium digital agency, member of the Public Council under the Ministry of Digital Development of our country.
Artificial intelligence is dumping more and more professions: the fate of typists and stenographers may soon be shared by copywriters, journalists and PR people.
At the same time, the development opportunities that AI brings are colossal. Therefore, the logic of digital-adepts is clear, calling to invest in content automation (primarily text content) as soon as possible. Embrace AI, they say, to keep up with the coming “robot race” that threatens to put entire industries out of work. But is this race so scary?
What is artificial intelligence capable of?
Neural networks are already writing quite coherent texts: in September 2021, Sber introduced an AI copywriter for compiling product cards, only a lazy person did not write about Yandex’s Balabob, whose texts are difficult to distinguish from human ones. And in the Guardian, a column written by a neural network was published back in September 2020.
Machines are also capable of other jobs: the Miami Herald newspaper, for example, in October 2021 replaced a real estate browser with a neural network – and it successfully copes with the task. And chatbots save the largest banks up to 360 man-hours a year.
Robots write catchy headlines for articles, target advertising campaigns, and even analyze annual reports. They do not create new content, but they work brilliantly with form – so brilliantly that they change any material beyond recognition, leaving any copyright (and here journalists have something to be afraid of).
Robots are most efficient in working with a stream of discrete data that can be categorized into blocks and operate on these blocks. We are talking about the analytics of weather, sports and financial reports: it just does not harm either the dryness of the language or the clumsiness of the wording, which sometimes affects the texts of neural networks.
What else will algorithms be able to do in the future?
The main advantage of algorithms is their ability to learn: today’s shortcomings of their texts (excessive dryness or inability to irony) will soon become a thing of the past.
While maintaining the current pace of development, AI is quite capable of reshaping part of the labor market. His work – after the costs of implementation and development pay off – will be cheaper, faster and better than human. But we are talking, first of all, about low-skilled professions, where people today act as machines.
After the plague of the XNUMXth century, the labor of the remnants of European workers rose unprecedentedly in price, spurring labor productivity and the creation of workshops: the value of a person grew, and the role of a person in labor changed. The current pandemic may accelerate this process: robots will turn a person not into a unit of labor, but into its controller, having made a new technological revolution.
How will this affect the labor market?
People around the world are not too optimistic about such prospects: a third of our countries, for example, are afraid of losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence. The government even had to launch a media campaign in October 2021 to fix its image. However, is it worth it to run away from the profession to programmers, web designers and developers?
It is unlikely: neural networks learn quickly, but a person will not be squeezed out soon. The average level of their texts is still comparable to the level of a low-skilled copywriter, and all the exceptions are the result of many years and very expensive work. The only niche that is under threat right now is SEO copywriting, which is already little different from machine labor (and still requires post-editing).
Progress is hampered by two other considerations. Firstly, there are strategically important industries (military-industrial complex, diplomacy, civil service), which are dangerous to allow AI into. Secondly, in crisis situations (with blackouts or new problems that the developers did not foresee), the cost of the labor of living people increases many times over, and some reserve in the market will always remain. New professions will also appear: operators of machine texts and proofreaders who will search for and correct machine defects.
Finally, it is far from certain that mass cuts – even if they happen – will turn out to be a problem for humanity. Increasingly, the world is talking about the benefits of an unconditional basic income (UBI): both South Korean presidential candidates and American scientists are proposing to introduce it. UBI will help smooth out the social effect of market changes, give people free time and a financial cushion in case of a crisis. Humans have been forced to work for centuries to reproduce, postponing their dreams due to debt and the threat of hunger, and with a basic income, everyone will have the right to choose from the full range of opportunities that life gives.
Why is artificial intelligence not perfect?
Displacement of a person from professions has its limits. There are roles that cannot be replaced by a person at all: automation can do away with the profession of a translator, stenographer, proofreader, but not an editor or a writer. Neural networks are able to write an ideal press release or perfectly fulfill technical specifications, but they do not have their own opinion and are not capable of reflection (humor, posting, reasoning).
Therefore, the focus of value will shift: the reader will attach more and more importance to expertise, the opinion of a particular content creator, and the verification of facts carried out by platforms. The word “author” will again begin to sound loud in contrast. Automated texts are unable to inspire confidence in the audience, and the difference in syllable or speed of writing will not become critical.
Neural networks have a limited function. Its main side is saving: time, resources, money. Artificial intelligence will help highly qualified specialists relieve the routine due to more advanced information processing. But no savings will pay off at the expense of quality.
What to expect from the future?
What AI model will the market ultimately lead to? It will streamline today’s chaos in relations between its players: now large and small agencies (primarily in the field of communications, marketing, digital PR), press services and journalistic structures operate separately, without even having a common conceptual language and a glossary of terms accepted by all. But neural networks cannot be trained without such a glossary, so sooner or later the situation will change. And not only in individual countries: robotization is closely connected with the evolution of the language (after all, it is itself built on computer languages). Therefore, sooner or later the terminology is unified both in each country and at the supranational level. This will be helped by the need to train specialists and assemble equipment in different countries according to uniform standards.
In our country, the trend has already emerged: quite recently, the AKOS Association developed a draft glossary of terms for the communications industry so that customers, performers and the media could unify the language they speak. The project looks promising, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
Another trend is platformization: algorithms will create Internet spaces for faster responses to requests. Integration with social networks will simplify SMM processes: social media content will be generated automatically (and possibly even personalized for specific user groups).
In the market of the future, the “man-man” system will be replaced by the “man-machine” system. This process will also affect the interaction with the client: for example, in the digital communications industry, the transformation of business models is inevitable. A typical market participant agency, in order to survive, will have to turn into an IT company, changing the personnel structure, management models and fully mastering those very algorithms.
However, all this will not happen soon: current generations have time to prepare for the transformation, master the skills of the future and maximize the benefits.
AI and neural networks cannot be called a threat or something revolutionary – on the contrary, they will help the market evolve and develop. Of course, some changes are inevitable. However, the fate of people, as always, will depend on themselves – the ability to master the skills of the future and keep up with the times.