Te-Ping Chen

Some of the things people are doing, inserting maybe deliberate typos to make it seem more authentic.

Not as many sort of short, punchy, staccato like sentence breaks.

Trying to do more things like even inject references to maybe obscure moments from sitcoms like The Office to make themselves sound more human.

It is getting harder to tell when something is AI written.

That's partly because AI, the writing is improving.

And also one aspect is that people are increasingly kind of absorbing this AI style of writing and voice.

And so some of the people I spoke to said that they don't necessarily use AI, but they find themselves sort of emulating its tics.

A number of people I spoke to likened it to sort of this new McCarthyism and wishing that they could just write like themselves.

even if sometimes that self does sound maybe a little bit more like AI, because AI, of course, learn from a lot of good writing out there.

It really varies.

We spoke to students and recent grads who are doing everything from changing their majors to adding minors that they think will be less impacted by AI to, in some cases,

Pretty dramatic shifts.

One worker we spoke to who had been in insurance actually quit his job and is now learning to be a firefighter because he thinks that you're always going to need actual people there on the ground.

And another, for example, college student who had been majoring in computer science and really intent on a career in tech, who now is, as of last year, dropped out and is in trade school studying to be an electrician.

We spoke to some folk who worked in tech and wound up starting their own startups, in some cases even AI-based startups, saying, okay, this is the technology that is coming on board very clearly.

This is something we want to get on this train.

And sort of leaning in that way, I spoke to one accountant who was really focused on trying to make sure he had AI related skills and saw it actually as a really solid edge in the job hunt.

Just being able to walk through the door and say, hi, I'm a young person who's here to teach you all these tools that you really need and make you more efficient.

In some cases, you definitely hear from young folk who see it as a tool that's really empowering them, and they see a lot of possibility and growth there.

But certainly when you talk to everyone from counselors to parents to students and grads themselves, there's just definitely a feeling of, okay, this is something that's in the water, it is coming, and we need to figure out something to do to try and prepare.