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[""Title""]: "How to Not Get Replaced By AI" [""Topic""]: ways to learn how to prompt and utilize AI in order to have the best chance of staying ahead in one's field and avoid having one's job "replaced" by AI. [""Body""]: There’s no turning back now. AI has rapidly advanced before our eyes, and it’s here to stay. It seems that in every industry, jobs are being evaluated for whether or not they can be performed better and/or cheaper by an AI model. If such a model running on a server can generate quality writing, data, images, and other outputs in a matter of seconds, why would a company continue to hire you to do so? We’ve all been hearing this lately, and there certainly is truth to it. The first time I was introduced to ChatGPT, it seemed unreal that a non-human can not only understand a prompt and respond to it so meaningfully, but also have as accurate of responses as I was seeing. If a computer can be this smart, then surely at least some employers will want to leverage it to save time and money. But can AI models go to work instead of you, understand what your team’s problems and goals are, listen to your boss’s feedback, critically think, and implement the right solutions? That’s where you come in. That is, if you are willing to put in the work to stay ahead of the curve. While AI has advanced as far as it has and can produce meaningful output, it currently is useless without one key ingredient: quality prompts. Currently, in order for AI to generate any output that is valuable to a business, someone needs to not only create the prompts necessary to have it do so, but the prompts need to be skillfully written to get the desired output. The saying “Garbage in, garbage out” is used to outline the fact that while AI can respond meaningfully to prompts, the prompts need to be written in specific ways to yield the desired output. If a report needs to be written in a specific way, the prompt used to generate or refine the report needs the specific instructions for the AI model to generate such a report. If a graphic design should capture a specific audience’s attention, the prompt needs to be written to generate an image that will appeal to that audience. See where I’m going with this? While AI may be able to more efficiently complete certain work than humans, humans still need to know how to program and utilize the AI models. Thus, in order to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible and reduce the risk of getting replaced by AI, the best thing to do is to identify the ways AI can do your job and learn how to prompt or otherwise program it to do so. Are you a graphic designer? Start attempting to write prompts to get the designs you are hoping to output. Are you a computer programmer? Start having AI models generate a baseline of the code you are trying to write. Make changes to the code it outputs as necessary and iterate on the prompts you use to generate it so you continue to gain this skill at prompting. If you think about it, this is a similar process as has been happening a lot since the Industrial Revolution. Did all farm workers get replaced by tractors and other high-tech machinery? No, you still need a person to operate the tractor. Did all postal service jobs get eliminated with the invention of the telephone? Perhaps many did, but the telephone companies created new jobs. New technology is used to produce output cheaper so more people can afford it, but there also end up being opportunities created for those who know how to leverage the new technology.