How is AI Affecting the Workplace
As AI sweeps through the workplace taking jobs in its wake through automation and algorithm, more and more advanced AI systems and technologies are being created, raising efficiency and accuracy with advanced systems and technologies.
In the courtroom where recent multi-million dollar cases are supplemented with AI hallucinations the chance of fraudulence and deceit arise. While this may be an extreme example, the power of AI cannot be understated. Let’s delve into the common workplace, how AI makes itself a presence, and how it hinders and helps people lives.
According to a Duncan B, a Partner in a major international law firm, AI is having a significant impact on the legal profession, “Tools are being deployed which help streamline research, enhance the accuracy of work products, and improve the overall client service. But, with all new technologies and innovation generally, comes responsibility: we must balance efficiency with ethical considerations and help to ensure the technology serves justice, not just speed, and in a way that considers the impact of people”.
AI may be inadvertently used, such as by some barristers, who unwittingly take AI summaries as concrete information for cases.
The branch most employed is Generative AI. Sources such as Co-pilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT are examples of Generative AI systems, learning patterns from existing data, and then formulating and recalling them creating new content. These models utilize collations of deep learning techniques, especially neural networks, to then identify relationships within data, generating new content based on previously learned patterns. Due to the massive wells of information they draw their conclusions from, they oftentimes produce incorrect information, based on completely incoherent facts that they formulate to seem like a reasonable answer. This, as can be assumed, can result in awfully incorrect facts, which can become especially dangerous, when its information is taken in place of concrete facts. Additionally many times has this proved to hinder the work of not only individuals working in law, but can be detrimental to virtually all up and-coming-jobs related to technology, with risk rising every day od development.
AI markets itself as a tool to help, and make work easier for business owners, and employees, however, certain fields find that the addition of AI rises tension, and stress, rather than mitigating it. The constant input of prompts was found to be exceedingly tedious, adding to the workload, and time taken to complete tasks.
PR agency founder Anurag Garg told BBC News he has found the addition of AI into his team of 11 lead to more burnout.
“There’s an overflow of AI tools in the market, and no single tool solves multiple problems. As a result, I constantly needed to keep tabs on multiple AI tools to execute tasks, which became more of a mess. It was hard to track which tool was supposed to do what, and I started getting utterly frustrated”.
In fact, in the Freelancer platform Upwork’s survey on 2500 people across, Australia, the UK and the US, 77% of the employees stated that AI tools actually decreased their productivity, adding to their workload instead. 47% of employees using AI said that they had no real idea how to actually leverage the tools they were given to meet the productivity gains expected of them.
Reported by Angus B