ON TECH || The Pitfalls of Overreliance on AI: Guarding Your Career and Personal Voice
The Surge of AI in Business
In recent weeks, chatbots, GPT, and other AI tools have rapidly permeated the business landscape. Watching a few TikTok clips reveals how you can assemble an entire AI suite to perform your job functions. While AI can significantly augment a marketer's role, there is a limit to this dependency. Crossing this threshold could endanger your career prospects.
The Threat of Losing Your Voice
What do we mean by this? Overdependence on AI might gradually lead to the loss of your distinctive voice. As a case in point, I've tested various AI tools recently. The rapid growth and evolution of these technologies are truly awe-inspiring. For instance, consider the revolutionary API for Photoshop that caused quite a stir on the internet just a few weeks ago.
Revolutionary AI Tools
Innovation didn't stop there. Photoshop soon introduced its generative AI tool, which astonished me. You can see the photo I made additions and expansions to below and see the before and after. With a simple click, I was able to seamlessly extend the canvas of my photo, adding rowboats and people to the scene within seconds. This suggests that technology is encroaching on jobs that once depended heavily on tech-savvy professionals in marketing, content creation, graphic design, visual arts, and visual communications.
An image generated using Midjourney where I added in people on rowboats and also expanded the canvas on both sides to the photo became more panoramic. See below for the original photo.
The original photo from my Mexico trip.
Staying Ahead of the AI Wave
In other words, if you lean too heavily on technology to perform your job, you risk becoming obsolete. Consider this: some comments on forums like Reddit and TikTok dismiss the graphics in generative AI as rudimentary, claiming their jobs are safe. Yet, if we look back at the evolution of graphics from PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 5 (I’m really dating myself here) and compare that to the timeline of AI tools, we will realize these tools have transformed the way we do business within a relatively short period.
Rise of New AI Ecosystems
Microsoft's release of Copilot and the ensuing ecosystem developed in collaboration with ChatGPT are akin to the birth of the Apple store. Remember how apps proliferated on mobile because the Apple Store platform enabled the mobile apps to serve and connect with consumers in an all-new way? The integration of AI into business services will, and for some, already has, change the way we work faster than you think.
I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I’ve utilized ChatGPT to generate content. It produces professional content, sparks new ideas when the team is brainstorming, and it can even optimize its output for search engines.
The Plugin Store on ChatGPT provides a slew of opportunities for ChatGPT app developers.
The Danger of Losing Individuality
However, what I found is that relying on AI might strip your content of your unique voice. When creating content, it should carry your distinctive stamp. You admire creators for their individualistic styles— be it humor, their way of saying things, or their communication style. These factors draw and resonate with their followers. If you overly rely on tools like ChatGPT, you risk losing your unique voice and, eventually, even forget how to convey it. After evaluating content generated by ChatGPT, I found that while it is professional and would meet the standard of regular communications day-to-day, it doesn’t sound like me. At least, not yet.
The Future of AI: Exciting or Disturbing?
Now, let's take it a step further. Consider all the data you're feeding into ChatGPT and other AI tools. Recently, Elon Musk released a photo of him with a robot, eerily lifelike. Of course, it was later revealed that the photo was generated by AI, but the robotics field is quite advanced already, especially with what we’ve seen in Japan in past years. What if all this data, all these personalities we’re feeding into these AI models, were used to clone us in the form of a robot? It might seem like an episode of Black Mirror, but given the rapid advancements in AI tech, this reality may not be far off.
Parting Thoughts
After extensive testing and daily use of various AI tools, these are my thoughts. The question remains: what’s your take on it?
