Australia has seen a drop in demand for AI (artificial intelligence) jobs in recent years amid growing concerns about the impact of the technology on society and the economy.
Federal Assistant Minister for Employment, Andrew Leigh has revealed the current demand for AI jobs in the country.
“We estimate that around one in 600 new jobs are AI jobs: that is, jobs where the main work of the job is AI.”
The figure came from an analysis by the government in collaboration with the online job platform SEEK.
The analysis examined job ads that looked at various AI skills, as well as job ads containing the word “artificial intelligence.” Both approaches yielded a similar result.
“So, Australians seem to be using AI quite a lot in our day‑to‑day activities, but the number of AI specialists is surprisingly small,” he said.
“I do hope that there are more of those sorts of jobs in the future, but actually, over recent years, the numbers have turned down rather than gone up.”
Mr. Leigh said the government was trying to figure out whether the occupations with more AI jobs are shrinking or growing.
“AI jobs are big in areas like mathematical sciences, life sciences, and interestingly, for music professionals as well, seem to be some areas where particular AI skills are sought after,” he said.
According to the analysis, AI jobs accounted for 6.3 percent of all mathematical science professional ads.
However, hiring in the AI sector has been stagnant due to economic uncertainty.
Concerns about AI’s Impacts
During a Senate hearing in late May, representatives from the Australian Media Literacy Alliance raised concerns that deep fakes and information generated by AI might affect voters in the upcoming election.Deep fakes are artificial images or videos of a person in which their face or body has been digitally manipulated to appear as somebody else.
They can be used by malicious actors to spread false information or cause harm to individuals.
“The Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) warning that there’s no legal way of stopping deep fakes of candidates highlights risks from generative AI tools, turbocharging myths and disinformation, and changing the media ecosystem with impact across all our democratic activities,” AMLA chair Anita Planchon said.
This came after News Corp Australia announced a major restructuring that would lead to the layoff of around 100 staff to help the company save $65 million (US$43 million) in operating costs.
News Corp has hinted at expanding the use of AI-produced content to cut costs and improve profitability.
In response to the senate committee’s worry, Australian Broadcasting Corporation Managing Director David Anderson confirmed that the public broadcaster would not be replacing its journalists with AI.
