- Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, spoke out about the issue of job losses due to AI.
- While AI will eliminate some creative jobs, “maybe creative jobs shouldn't have existed in the first place,” she said.
- Writer Ed Zitron called Murati's comments a “declaration of war on creative labor.”
OpenAI CTO Mira Murati spoke out about job losses due to AI this month, arguing that workers replaced by AI, particularly in creative roles, are doing jobs that “should never have existed in the first place.”
In doing so, she not only infuriated people who are at risk of losing their livelihoods to technological advances, but also seemed to reveal that she doesn't even know what AI is good for.
At a June 8 event at Dartmouth College, Murati spoke with college trustee Jeffrey Blackburn about the AI behind ChatGPT. We will also discuss DALL-E and the safety and ethical considerations that come with advancing technology.
When asked how AI will change artists' creative processes, Murati said that in the near future, the technology will be used primarily as a collaboration tool to help more people. Become creative.
“Some creative jobs may disappear,” Murati said, “but if the content they produce is not of high quality, then maybe they shouldn't have existed in the first place.”
Notably, Murati himself raised the issue of job losses due to AI, suggesting that workers whose inventions helped train AI into what it is today may now be doing jobs that shouldn't exist in the first place because of AI.
Ed Zitron, author, podcast host, and CEO of the national tech and business public relations firm EZPR, told Business Insider that Murati's perspective comes from a distance between executives and the people who actually make things.
“To date, the people who have lost their jobs to AI have been contractors who have helped fill gaps in organizations — and rightly so — but now they're going to be filled with incredibly mediocre work, contracted by people who don't understand the business they're in to fill needs they don't care about or value. It's like a slow poison that weakens the corporate edge,” Zitron said.
“I'm tired of people who don't make anything or write or paint or sing or do anything creative having a say in what the creative arts should be or how they should be run,” Zitron added.
“These people treat creativity like a problem to be solved,” he continued.
When Business Insider reached out to a representative for OpenAI, they declined to comment, instead pointing us to a June 22nd X post in which Murati detailed his thoughts.
How do artists actually approach AI?
Boris Erdaghsen is a photographer and visual artist who works with AI. Last year, he won the Sony World Photography Awards with a photo he created with the help of OpenAI's DALL-E2 as part of an effort to show how impossible it is to distinguish between “real” artwork and AI-created artwork. He ultimately declined the award.
Eldagsen told BI that while he once worked as a “solo instrument” to create new works, he now sees himself as the conductor working with AI technology, with the training data acting as a “giant anonymous choir” and his job to “bring it into some kind of harmony and make sense.”
That being said, he still doesn't agree with Murati.
“I find it disappointing and I don't see any empathy. To me, her comments are a mix of naivety and arrogance,” Eldagsen told Business Magazine. “I think she really hasn't thought it through or is unable to put herself in the shoes of people who are scared to lose their jobs.”
It's “complete nonsense” to say that the jobs that could be eliminated by AI shouldn't exist in the first place, Erdaghsen said, noting that suggesting poor quality is at the root of those job losses shows Murati doesn't really understand how and why people make and consume things.
“Most of what we produce is not high quality. We have fast food, crappy TVs, cheap stuff that we use once and then throw away,” Eldagsen said. “All of this shouldn't exist in the first place, but it's all a job that some people have to do. They pay their rent, they make a living. Why be so arrogant and say it shouldn't exist? I just don't get it.”
Artist, photographer, and writer Miles Astley told Business Insider that he found Murati's comments “condescending.”
Like Eldagsen, Astley made AI the focus of one of his own works this month, reversing Eldagsen's stunt and winning third place in the AI art contest with a photo of a real flamingo.
Astley said he doesn't believe AI can accelerate creativity. He said that while AI technology can save time, streamline repetitive tasks, and give artists more room to develop ideas that can actually be creative, getting a computer to do the creative work itself trivializes the process, and ultimately makes the AI just a copy of the data it was trained on. example of human creative expression.
“You have to sit down with paper and a paintbrush and start drawing, and that's how you hone your skills,” Astley said. “I think where this technology will really benefit are businesses that use it as a productivity and labor-saving tool.”
Ultimately, Astley said he believes the tension between technology and creativity has less to do with making the creative process easier, and more to do with companies using technology to outsource work so they don't need to hire a creative workforce.
“I think we need to have a public and honest discussion about the benefits of AI technology, but also its pitfalls and dangers,” Astley said. “But that's not what she was doing.”
“All they want is mediocrity.”
“AI tools have the potential to lower barriers and empower anyone with an idea to create,” Murati wrote in a June 22 post on X. “At the same time, we must be honest and admit that AI can automate certain tasks — just as spreadsheets transformed the work of accountants and bookkeepers, AI tools can help us create online ads, generate generic images and templates, and more.”
She added that a key part of the discussion around AI-induced job loss, particularly in creative professions, is “recognizing the difference between temporary creative work and work that adds lasting meaning and value to society.”
“By allowing AI tools to take on the more repetitive or mechanical aspects of the creative process, like generating SEO metadata, human creators can free up space to focus on higher-level creative thinking and choices,” Murati wrote. “This allows artists to retain control of their vision and focus their energy on the most important parts of their work.”
But not everyone is convinced.
“During the AI boom of the past two years, OpenAI and its allies have been very careful not to attack labor directly,” Zitron told BI. “What Murati is saying here — that some creative jobs 'shouldn't have existed in the first place' — is a blatant declaration of war on creative labor, and OpenAI is clearly stating not only that it believes there is 'inefficiency' in creativity, but that it will be part of the process of 'fixing' it.”
Zitron believes AI is nearing the top of the S-curve with limited progress to make, and said Murati, Sam Altman and others at OpenAI are “furiously arguing that AGI and amazing machines that can do the work of 100,000 people are on the way.”
These proposals keep the money flowing as companies clamor for the latest versions of promising new technologies that backers promise will make workplaces faster, more efficient and cheaper to run — all the buzzwords needed to keep investors interested, even if the end result is churning out substandard products.
“The output from the AI is mediocre and barely up to the quality required for the task,” Zitron says, “but humans are too often removed from the process and only want mediocre results, even if it means making the rest of the project worse.”
