Generative AI is impacting jobs across sectors, report finds

12/03/24 • 7 min

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Ever since ChatGPT hit the scene a couple years ago, there’s been a nagging sense of dread for many: what will this mean for jobs? Well, new research from Imperial College London finds a shift already underway. Between July 2021 and July 2023, the report found freelance job postings for writing and coding decreased by about 20%. There was also a slowdown in freelance jobs for visual art. And it’s happening more quickly than past technological disruptions, Ozge Demirci, one of the coauthors of that report and a business professor at Imperial College London, told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

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The year of “AI slop”

The internet has been overrun by AI content. The weirdly glowing and inadvertently surreal airbrushed images, the generic and oddly formal sentences peppered with factual errors and distracting phrases like “as of my last knowledge update.” So much of social media content these days has the unmistakable stench of “AI slop,” hastily spit out by image generators or chatbots to get a few likes. And while the phenomenon might seem harmless or sometimes even charming, the AI slop takeover of the internet is crowding out real information and human perspectives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox, about how AI slop is transforming social media.

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Why Google’s “smart city” failed

The Quayside development on Toronto’s waterfront was supposed to be the shining example of a tech-optimized smart city, an urban environment reinvented “from the internet up,” as it was described by Sidewalk Labs. That was a sister company to Google, which won a government bid in 2017 to modernize the 12 acres of former dockland. There would be robotaxis, heated sidewalks, adaptive traffic lights and lots of data collection. But in 2020, Sidewalk Toronto suddenly shut down before a single ribbon had been cut, turning a shining example into a cautionary tale. It’s all chronicled in a new book from Globe and Mail reporter Josh O’Kane called “Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with O’Kane about what went on behind the scenes of the Sidewalk Toronto project.