Are we losing our jobs to AI?

Autonomous vehicles, AI and content moderation – WebPurify VP of Trust & Safety,?Alex Popken, shares her views.

In recent years, the media has centered on the idea that AI will replace human jobs, with content moderation being one of the fields where this concern is most pronounced.

But as someone on the front lines, I want to offer a different perspective and address the question: Are we losing our jobs to AI?

The answer: Not yet.

In fact, technologies like generative AI (GenAI) have increased our workload, demanding more human intervention to ensure quality and safety.?

This misconception extends beyond content moderation. The New York Times recently published a surprising article, How Self-Driving Cars Get Help From Humans Hundreds of Miles Away, which reveals the truth behind the myth of full vehicle autonomy. “For years, companies avoided mentioning the remote assistance provided to their self-driving cars,” they report. “The illusion of complete autonomy helped to draw attention to their technology and encourage venture capitalists to invest the billions of dollars needed to build increasingly effective autonomous vehicles.”

The truth?

Self-driving cars sometimes struggle to drive themselves. In ambiguous situations, they get help from human technicians in control centers hundreds of miles away.?

The piece highlights this with an example from Cruise: "When regulators last year ordered Cruise to shut down its fleet of 400 robot taxis in San Francisco after a woman was dragged under one of its driverless vehicles, the cars were supported by about 1.5 workers per vehicle, including remote assistance staff. Those workers intervened to assist the vehicles every two and a half to five miles."

How does this apply to content moderation?

Much like autonomous vehicles, AI-driven content moderation requires human oversight and involvement. The idea that GenAI will fully replace human moderators is, at least for now, misleading. In reality, the demand for human moderators has only increased, as new use cases emerge where human judgment is indispensable. We are not only involved in reviewing data to train these models, but also play a critical role in evaluating their output for accuracy and compliance.?

Let me be clear: This is a rapidly evolving field, and I fully expect AI to surpass humans in many tasks. The contextual understanding of GenAI is unlike any traditional AI model I've worked with in my 11+ years in Trust & Safety – it's as precise as a scalpel, while its predecessors were more like blunt instruments.

But I want to set the record straight: AI isn't taking jobs – it's creating them in my field.