Image by Carl Campbell, from Unsplash
Sales, Admin, And Tech Jobs Most At Risk from AI, Microsoft Says
- Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
- Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager
Microsoft Research conducted a new study which warns how Copilot, alongside other generative AI tools, will impact jobs in fields such as sales roles, software development work, and office administration positions.
In a rush? Here are the quick facts:
- Most affected: sales, software, admin, education, legal, media roles.
- AI excels in gathering, writing, and teaching tasks across sectors.
- Manual labor jobs remain least impacted by generative AI tools.
The study , based on 200,000 real-world user-AI conversations, found that the most common tasks AI assists with include gathering information, writing, and teaching, which are all activities central to many white-collar jobs.
The research demonstrates that AI most strongly affects the employment sectors of Sales, Computer and Mathematical, Office and Administrative Support, Education, Legal, and Media and Communication.
These are jobs where much of the work revolves around processing, creating, or communicating information, something AI does increasingly well.
“Information gathering and writing activities receive the most positive thumbs feedback and are the most successfully completed tasks,” the study noted. It added that AI often acts as a “coach, advisor, or teacher that gathers information and explains it to the user.”
While AI hasn’t yet fully automated any single job, the overlap between AI’s abilities and job tasks is growing. “There are definitely some occupations for which many—perhaps even most—work activities have some overlap with demonstrated AI capabilities,” the researchers found.
Still, the authors caution against assuming these jobs will immediately disappear. “It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated […] This would be a mistake,” they write, citing past examples like ATMs, which shifted job roles rather than eliminating them entirely.
The study indicates that knowledge-based and communication-heavy roles will experience the most immediate disruption, while manual labor and physical jobs remain relatively unaffected.
The ability of AI to perform tasks determines which jobs will be at risk, thus requiring workers, educators, and policymakers to understand this relationship.
Image by Jonathan Kemper from Unsplash
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent Outsmarts CAPTCHA
- Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
- Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent successfully completed the human verification test by simply clicking on it, as the tech community watched with surprise.
In a rush? Here are the quick facts:
- The AI narrated the verification process in real time.
- Cloudflare’s system didn’t trigger a full CAPTCHA challenge.
- Reddit users shared screenshots of the AI completing tasks online.
The ChatGPT Agent from OpenAI passed an anti-bot verification test by clicking on the “Verify you are human” checkbox, which left the tech community surprised, as first reported by ArsTechnica .
In a screenshot shared on Reddit, the AI passed Cloudflare’s “Verify you are human” checkbox and later explained its step-by-step actions.
“The link is inserted, so now I’ll click the ‘Verify you are human’ checkbox to complete the verification on Cloudflare. This step is necessary to prove I’m not a bot and proceed with the action,” the bot stated as it moved through the process, as reported by ArsTechnica
The ChatGPT Agent works as a new OpenAI AI assistant browsing tool that operates in an isolated virtual environment. The system requires user authorization before it can execute actual operations, including buying products. The irony of this situation became apparent as the bot successfully proved its “not a bot” status.
The agent skipped the image-based CAPTCHA but successfully passed the Turnstile system of Cloudflare, which evaluates human interaction, which uses mouse movements, browser behavior, and other cues to test for human interaction.
The ability of bots to bypass these systems isn’t entirely new, but ChatGPT Agent’s live narration adds a surreal touch. CAPTCHA systems, meant to separate bots from humans, are now sometimes helping to train the AI they’re meant to stop.
Some people believe this development will become a standard in the future. The security tests become easy for ChatGPT Agent to pass, yet it faces difficulties with poorly designed websites, proving that bad web design might be more effective than CAPTCHA at stopping the bots.
