What AI brings to the table and its risks

Worse, AI is already being used to write content for websites, so there may also be a shortage of alternative jobs requiring writing skills.

There is certainly something to this fear. Since 1984 there has been a decline of 43 percent per capita in people involved in Information, Media and Telecommunications. That understates the decline.

There was actually an increase between 1984 and 2007, which was peak employment, of 19 percent per capita.

Since the peak, the last 17 years has seen a decline of 71 percent. In absolute number it is not so bad with numbers today being the same as they were in 1995, but in the same time the workforce has increased by 78 percent.

Perhaps things will get worse. This is a not-unwarranted fear with News Corporation in Australia having 600 positions on the chopping block.

With the dismal economics in the way we currently produce news, economies will have to be found somewhere or our existing institutions will go under.

Then there is the somewhat optimistic end.

In recent news Vox and The Atlantic have signed deals with OpenAI, as has News Corp. These deals are promising because OpenAI will be paying them for access to their news sites and archives.

I've recently written about the absurdity of news organisations expecting social media and search engines like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to pay them for displaying links to news articles on their sites when media organisations derive much of their traffic from those sites who effectively advertise for them.

That is the whole point of a search engines and to a lesser extent social media, and the reason media organisations take such care to curate their web pages to be friendly to discovery and display on those sites.

Search engines are really a primitive form of AI.

They scrape content off the net, which they then curate for users, often, depending on the engine, personalising the results on the basis of the user's previous searches.