How Creatives and Knowledge Workers Can Thrive in the Era of AI
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This year, excitement about AI has soared to heights previously unseen. All of a sudden, the dystopian future depicted in countless sci-fi movies seems to be knocking at humanity’s front door. In reality, however, the development and use of AI has been expanding for decades. What makes recent developments so exciting (and for many, frightening) is that powerful content-generation tools are now in the hands of everyday creatives and knowledge workers, generating fascinating results, often for free.
In the following interview article , the English version of 私たちは変わるべきか～AIのある世界～, Saga Consulting contributor Shiho Baisho reveals my thoughts on AI use across cultures. Read on to discover the opportunities and threats that AI presents to knowledge workers and creatives, with a focus on the United States and Japan.
How is AI supporting creative knowledge work in the United States?
A lot of people don’t realize that although the rise of AI use in the west may seem sudden, marked by the instant popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, savvy creatives have been relying on AI tools for quite some time.
For example, writers and marketers have been leveraging Writesonic and Jasper well before the ChatGPT boom. Initially, these predecessors weren’t as powerful as ChatGPT, but they gave creators a solid idea of where AI technology was heading. We even saw glimpses of AI in the Microsoft 365 versions of PowerPoint and Excel, which could automatically generate slides and data insights, respectively.
These days, creatives and knowledge workers are using AI for almost everything: writing and editing, data analysis, image creation, research, automating repetitive tasks, and so much more. At present, the only reason that AI isn’t more widely adopted is that the public is still acclimating to the possibilities of AI and learning how to live with such a powerful, versatile tool. We’re still not used to constantly asking ourselves, “How can AI help me with this?” and coming up with the right prompts to meet our needs. The technology is evolving so fast that we’re running on a hamster wheel, just trying to keep up.
What do you think of the Japanese market’s recent reaction to AI?
As is often the case, I find Japan Inc.’s approach toward AI to be more cautious and measured. That being said, Japanese companies picked up on the privacy and security implications of AI quickly and seem to be more conscious of those risks than their western counterparts. Some major corporations have banned the use of AI while others are already implementing custom, closed AI systems that employees can use while keeping proprietary data off the internet. This cautious approach may initially put Japanese companies at a competitive disadvantage, but it may pay off in the long run when the privacy concerns of AI use become a stark reality. On the other hand, the government seems to be taking a hands-off approach, at least for the time being. This makes sense, considering that AI will probably be a countermeasure for the country’s impending demographic collapse.
Among the general population, just like the rest of the world, I’m confident that Japanese people will rely on AI more and more for translation related tasks. It will be especially interesting to see how AI impacts the country’s English-education industry.
How will AI change the working style of knowledge workers and creators worldwide in the future? Will this change occur in Japan as well?
I’m not a futurist, but as someone who has been experimenting with AI tools for quite some time and studies the industry actively, I believe AI will have a profoundly positive impact on the productivity of knowledge workers. In fact, that impact is already here—all it takes is a quick scan of the headlines to see what people are accomplishing with AI: term papers, legal briefs, website creation, accounting work, and more.
AI can already outperform the low-cost writing work that some companies rely on in attempts to game search engine results. In other words, AI has already killed the content-farming industry—at least the part of it that relies on human writers.
That being said, I’m hoping for a net positive result regarding the changes that AI will bring, just as we’ve seen with previous technological shifts. Seth Godin explains it best: “Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.”
Ideally, AI will continue to evolve as a tool that helps us get more work done, more efficiently than ever before, resulting in end products that were previously beyond our capabilities. Inevitably, there will be new jobs and careers created to achieve these results—prompt engineers, for example.
What are some pitfalls of AI that we should be aware of?
In my experience, hallucination—making up fake information that looks accurate—is AI’s Achilles’ heel. This means that any significant content that AI creates will still need human fact checking.
Additionally, in order to create new content, AI can only use what already exists—the data it was trained on. It can’t yet go out into the world, participate in new experiences, and then produce content based on those experiences. Therefore, a lot of AI content is generic and uninteresting. This isn’t an issue for rote, academic work, such as writing term papers. When it comes to marketing, however, we’re still far from the point where we can create quality, engaging content with a single keystroke.
What skills and abilities will knowledge workers and creators need to survive in the AI era?
Due to the hamster-wheel effect mentioned earlier, creators need to learn and master AI tools as quickly as possible. You want to be able to position yourself as an authority—someone who can help employers or clients generate the results they expect from AI. This means:
Learning how to write effective prompts
Familiarizing yourself with the pros, cons, and best use cases of multiple AI platforms (e.g., OpenAI, Bing, Bard, Poe, Perplexity, etc.)
Knowing how to edit and fact check AI-generated content
You should also double down on what AI cannot replicate: conveying personal knowledge and experiences that are unique to you. This means that you may need to dig deep into your work or educational background to synthesize new insights that aren’t in an AI’s training set. Additionally, you may have to be more personal in your art, writing, or creative work.
In order to thrive in the AI era, we’re going to have to be more human than ever before.