Lone Star state residents shared fears over AI’s rapid advancement and how it may impact different aspects of life.
Genuinely, I’m much more afraid for the job loss,” said Eilidh, an Austin resident who works in retail.
But Girish was more optimistic.
“People will find new avenues for jobs,” he told Fox News. “I think it suggests re-skilling that needs to be done.”
AI technologies capable of producing professional-level text, audio and video materials have rapidly evolved in recent months. The increasing sophistication has prompted legal and ethical disputes across multiple industries around the world.
Some experts in the field, like Gary Marcus, have warned of AI’s many risks, like enabling bad actors to more easily commit more convincing fraud. Others, such as computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber, has said the same tools can be used to combat bad actors.
Still, Dan, a Kansas City resident who was visiting Austin, said he was afraid AI would cost jobs.
“I think that’s a possibility in certain industries,” he said.
As 300 million jobs worldwide could be lost or diminished because of AI advances, according to a March 26 Goldman Sachs report. The analysis predicted that the technologies could cause “significant disruption” to the global labor market in the coming years by fully or partially replacing humans across sectors.
One person told Fox News he feared AI could cause greater problems around identity theft. Another worried that it could potentially take over the military.
Girish, of Austin, said he was most concerned that the data used to train AI technology systems could contain racial bias.
“One thing I’ve been thinking deeply about is the concept of racial bias and … the existing data probably which is being used to train the AI models,” he told Fox News. “Hopefully, that can be resolved or people are cognizant of that.”
Eilidh, meanwhile, pointed to a March “South Park” episode that ChatGPT helped write. She said it indicated that content creators’ jobs were also at risk.
“Artists are now kind of getting worried about the art AI things ’cause it almost feels like they don’t even have a place in the job force anymore,” she told Fox News. “Neither do writers, ’cause eventually I feel like it’s all gonna take over.”
