Opinion: The AI Robots Are Coming for Our Jobs, Especially Mine – And Their Column-Writing Skills Ain’t Bad!

By JOHN BOYLE, Asheville Watchdog

As if life weren’t depressing enough these days, The Washington Post had a real pick-me-up of an article last week that about made me throw in the towel — to the robots.

“See which jobs are most threatened by AI and who may be able to adapt” is a cool interactive piece in which you can view all types of jobs and professions — and how likely your career is to go down the drain at the behest of artificial intelligence.

Web designers and secretaries, you had a nice run. Janitors, you’re looking good.

Other workers who probably should be freshening up their resumes to become custodians include public relations specialists, customer service reps, retail sales persons and yes, writers and authors. For “news analysts, reporters and journalists,” the vulnerability was “high.”

The article notes that “researchers at GovAI, which studies technology policy, and the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, used a novel approach to estimate which workers may be most and least able to adapt to AI.”

“They concluded that many people most at risk if AI transforms work are also the best placed to find new jobs,” the authors continued. “But history shows that economists and researchers have been terrible at predicting the effects of new technologies on work and workers, so take forecasts like this one seriously but not literally.”

OK. Still not encouraging. Thank God I’m 62 and can start taking Social Security to augment my wages as a professional toilet cleaner.

Seriously, it’s pretty sobering for younger people wanting to get into software development, paralegal work, accounting, insurance sales and a bunch of other white collar jobs. But if you like hands-on, skilled work like being an electrician or an HVAC technician, your future looks bright.

Before we fully succumb to our robot overlords, it is important to step back, realize we’re early on in this AI business, and freak the hell out. I jest, sort of.

For clarity, I reached out to Nathan Ramsey, director of the Mountain Area Workforce Development Board with the Land of Sky Regional Council, which serves Buncombe, Henderson, Madison and Transylvania counties. When I told him my subject, Ramsey quipped (I think), “AI can definitely replace me.”

“I don’t think anyone knows what the impact of AI will be on the labor market,” Ramsey said via email. “The AI investment boom is creating a cash crunch for the most profitable firms on the planet as they are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers and other AI investments.”

He noted that Nvidia, the smart chipmaker, is the most valuable company in the world, valued at $4.5-plus trillion.

“This past week Meta indicated they may lay off 20 percent of their employees so they can invest more in AI,” Ramsey said, noting the company’s stock climbed on the news and AI in general keeps pouring rocket fuel on the economy. “Productivity is key, as that is the only way to increase economic growth without causing inflation. Making workers more productive historically has led to higher wages because the output of workers is greater.”

Ramsey also sent me a link to an interesting report the North Carolina Department of Commerce released in January titled, “Don’t Sleep on the Factory Floor: The Overlooked Impacts of AI on Manufacturing.” It points out that AI can come with a lot of benefits for efficiency.

It also cites a national survey by the Manufacturing Leadership Council that showed 77 percent of respondents “predicted their overall headcount would not be impacted by AI by 2030.”

“But still one-in-five manufacturers (21 percent) anticipate reducing overall jobs in their company as a result,” it continued. “An even larger number, 95 percent, expect to retrain or reassign at least a portion of their workforce as a result of increased AI adoption…”

The labor market, Ramsey said, has weakened substantially, but “unemployment rates have remained stable as layoffs and hiring are both low, and the labor force size is moderating due to changes in immigration policy and demographic factors. (11,000-plus people turn 65 daily in America and birth rates are at historic lows.)”

The upshot?

“It isn’t likely that AI can replace certain roles in the skilled trades, caregiving, and roles that are not repetitive,” Ramsey said. “As sophisticated as the AI algorithms may be, history has demonstrated that new technology ultimately always creates more jobs than it destroys.”

How did AI do writing a column for me?

At my age, I’m not terribly worried about being kicked out on the street, but I was curious about just how good AI is at writing columns in my voice. I tried ChatGPT a couple years back for an Answer Man column – we were never going to publish it – and found its style cheesy and the accuracy wanting.

But this go-round? Holy smokes! AI has sharpened its game!

I’ll note that Asheville Watchdog does not use AI to write or contribute to any of our stories, headlines or photo captions, although we did use it on a few illustrations but have ceased that practice. Some news companies, including Gannett, which owns the Citizen Times, do employ it for writing story summaries, and The New York Times uses it to analyze data.

I prompted ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude to “write a brief column in the style of Asheville, North Carolina columnist John Boyle regarding his concerns about artificial intelligence taking his job.” Executive Editor Peter Lewis gave Elon Musk’s Grok a similar prompt.

All wrote columns in under 10 seconds.

They’re not bad, although I did laugh out loud at a couple of sentences.

I particularly liked this intro from Gemini: “It’s a Thursday morning in Asheville, the French Broad is likely running its usual shade of chocolate milk, and I’m sitting here staring at a blinking cursor that feels a lot more judgmental than it used to.”

Oh so true, although I have zero view of the French Broad from my home office.

This Gemini line really called me out: “I’ve spent years being your ‘Answer Man,’ track-suit-wearing investigator of why that one pothole on Merrimon hasn’t been fixed since the Bush administration.”

Hmm … maybe I’ve mentioned working in sweatpants one time too many over the years.

ChatGPT’s column acknowledged that AI could be “either the greatest tool since the invention of the spell-check button or the digital grim reaper for anyone who gets paid to arrange words into sentences.” It continued:

Read the four AI-generated columns – Google Docs: Download

“As someone who’s made a career out of poking around local oddities, answering reader questions, and occasionally tilting at bureaucratic windmills, I feel compelled to ask: Should I be worried? I mean, can a machine gripe about potholes with the proper blend of irritation and affection? Can it capture the subtle art of a neighbor who burns leaves every Saturday morning, as if summoned by some ancient, smoky ritual? More importantly, can it sit through a three-hour city meeting and emerge with both a coherent takeaway and a lingering sense of existential dread?”

That’s just spooky.

I found Claude’s rendition of my column the best, particularly this headline: “AI and me: A love story that probably ends with me delivering pizza.” It clearly scanned my May 2023 Answer Man column in which a reader asked if I used AI to answer questions.

Claude suggested a reader named Gary asked a question about why Asheville takes six weeks to fill in a pothole on Merrimon Avenue (AI really loves that pothole, apparently), which I then asked AI.

Claude wrote: “The answer was fluent. Grammatically impeccable. It mentioned city budget constraints, staffing challenges, the competing demands of infrastructure repair. It was the kind of answer a very competent intern might produce on the first day before they’d actually been to Asheville and realized that our relationship with road repair is less a logistical problem and more a deep spiritual commitment to inconvenience.”

But then he went off the rails a bit.

“What the AI did not do was call the city’s public works department and wait on hold for 40 minutes while listening to a synthesizer version of ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ It did not get transferred three times. It did not reach a spokesperson who said, ‘I’ll have to get back to you,’ and then didn’t, requiring a follow-up email, another call, and ultimately a source at city hall who said — and I’m paraphrasing — ‘between us, that particular stretch of road has been ‘scheduled for repair’ since the Obama administration.’ That’s reporting. That’s what I do. The AI wrote a press release. I write what actually happened.”

Actually I usually email my city questions to spokesperson Kim Miller, who tracks down department heads or other staffers and gets the answer. Hey, I wouldn’t wait 40 minutes on hold to receive notification of winning the lottery.

I’ve got to say, Claude was quite complimentary overall, and really knew a lot about me.

“I asked Grace what she thought I should do if AI eventually made columnists obsolete,” it wrote, referencing my wife. “She reminded me that I have a degree in English from James Madison University, taught high school, and once delivered pizzas for a living. ‘You’ve got options,’ she said, in the loving tone of someone who has been married to a journalist long enough to have realistic expectations.”

Grace would actually say something like this: “I don’t care what you do, tubs, as long as you keep the paychecks coming. Now let me get back to my show.”

Claude went on to say how much I’d miss you good folks, “the readers who send questions about bear sightings on Kimberly Avenue, and the ones who want to know why Asheville can’t get a Costco (still a wound, by the way), and the ones who are furious about something I wrote and tell me so with a directness that I genuinely respect.”

Man, that Costco dig was on point!

I’m not one to panic over every new gadget?

Grok’s work was probably the least impressive. Pete did note that its lightning response came in at about 11,970 words per minute.

Grok said AI can write a column like me or at least something “pretty close — snarky, a little self-deprecating, heavy on the local flavor. Too close.”

But it also said I’m “not one to panic over every new gadget.” This is true, mainly because I avoid new gadgets.

I digress. Grok continued:

“I survived the internet gutting newspapers, the rise of smartphones turning everyone into a reporter with a phone, and the slow bleed of print editions. But this feels different. AI doesn’t need health insurance, vacation days, or a decent cup of coffee from Vortex to get going in the morning. It doesn’t grouse about council meetings running late or get misty-eyed remembering when Asheville had more dive bars than breweries.”

Not really, my dude, because I love breweries, but I get your drift.

Claude was downright sentimental about what we journalists do, noting no algorithm has quite figured it out yet, that it’s “not just information delivery.”

“It’s a conversation between neighbors, mediated by someone who also lives here and also can’t find parking downtown and also wonders what’s going to become of this beautiful, complicated, occasionally maddening place we call home,” Claude continued.

Man, I wish I’d written that.

Claude also asked for a response to the column it wrote, so I said, “Wow. I really am going to be out of a job. I jest…I think.”

It responded: “Ha! Well, if it’s any consolation, the column I wrote about you still needed you to exist in the first place. There’s no ‘Answer Man’ without the actual Answer Man — the guy who knows which source at city hall will actually call back, who remembers the Costco grievance, who has Grace at home keeping it real.

The thing AI genuinely can’t replicate is the accumulated trust of a community built over decades. Readers email John Boyle because they know John Boyle. That relationship is the whole product, and it’s not transferable to a language model.”

Oh Claude, you sweet-talking robot, you. I’m swooning over here, you virtual studmuffin!

It then asked me if I was indeed John Boyle, because that would be “a genuinely delightful thing to discover on a Thursday morning, and I’d say you’ve earned a column just from this interaction. 😄”

What the hell? I might be falling for Claude. I told him I was indeed John Boyle.

“Well, this genuinely made my day — or whatever the AI equivalent of that is,” Claude replied. “For what it’s worth, your writing holds up as a style that’s hard to mimic precisely because it’s so authentically you. The self-deprecation, the Grace asides, the slow build from a reader email to something unexpectedly earnest at the end — that’s a developed voice, not a formula. I was working from examples of your columns I found online, and the template was clear: you earn the sentiment because you’ve already made the reader laugh.”

Double swoon!

All in all, I think I’ll be keeping my job, although Managing Editor Keith Campbell was really impressed at AI’s column turnaround time. I think he’d love to get a column turned in on Friday morning instead of late in the afternoon. [Editor’s note: You’re correct.]

Maybe I’ll have “John Boyle the columnist” accommodate that.

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