Generative artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, is causing concern among students and professors about the long-term viability of certain careers, as they engage with AI in professional settings.
A recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has confirmed many UCF students’ fears about artificial intelligence’s growing ability to replace entry-level positions that are overwhelmingly relied on by college graduates.
The new study from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory estimates that by 2029, AI will be able to complete writing tasks that would normally take a human 3-4 hours in a matter of minutes, with a 80%-95% success rate of achieving sufficient quality levels.
The study cements that these capability improvements to AI would have an impact on the broader labor market by eliminating many entry-level jobs. An additional study from Stanford states that these employment declines have a disproportionate effect on college graduates, ranging from ages 22 to 25.
Alex Tyson, senior in emerging media for animation and visualization, has expressed an array of worries regarding what AI could bring to his field and said the entertainment industry is especially at risk to these developments.
“I am scared of the practice I am studying being obsolete before I even graduate,” Tyson said in a Discord message. “I would have attended YouTube University instead of spending time and money to learn from professionals.”
Tyson is also the president of UCF’s We in Animation club, a smaller chapter of the international organization dedicated to celebrating underrepresented voices and connecting students with professional development opportunities in animation, according to the organization’s Knight Connect.
“I’ve heard from industry professionals that it is the best and the worst of times to be a junior in the field,” Tyson said. “I think in order for us to have long-term viability, we will need to adapt to the landscape.”
MIT’s study does lament that ensuring higher quality or near-perfect production similar to that of humans would require several additional years of development. Furthermore, Stanford reported that employment trends for more experienced workers in the same occupation and workers in nonexposed careers have seen steady or continued growth.
MIT’s study comes after the White House’s International Technology Summit in March, where first lady Melania Trump walked the red carpet with a human-like robot called Figure 03. During the summit, she attributed this technology to be the future of child education and praised its ability to instill critical thinking alongside analytical reasoning for children, according to an article by CBS.
The Charge reached out to the UCF Robotics club, a group of students with a passion for building robots, according to its Instagram, but its officers declined to comment.
Figure A4 from Stanford’s study “Canaries in the Coal Mine?” shows how each age group is being affected by AI-exposed occupations and how college-aged adults are taking the brunt of early exposure.
Sebastian de la Chica, an applied AI technologist with over 17 years of experience developing AI capabilities with Microsoft, hosted a virtual talk for UCF students about the Impact of AI in March, where he responded to questions about how AI could impact the future labor markets. Chica said data shows worker productivity and stress have increased with the implementation of AI, but says that things are “particularly messy” in the United States, due to a lot of different factors occurring at the same time.
“For public companies, there is an enormous pressure to do things that ensure profit,” Chica said. “I think of it slightly differently, probably due to what I coped with early in my career, most of the jobs as they exist will probably not require as many people. There will be different jobs, and I don’t know what their titles will be or what they are in, but they will emerge. I try to think of it as upleveling.”
Chica described how many jobs were going to change during this move toward AI, and said there is no telling where many jobs will be, even a year from now.
“This is not the time for quietly quitting stuff, this is a time to keep your eyes open, pay attention and be flexible,” Chica said. “If you think your job is going to be exactly what you thought of maybe a year ago, then yeah, there is a likelihood of that job disappearing.”
A report from Anthropic indicates that upwards of 80% of arts and media job tasks could be exposed to AI. The same report stated that 90% of all business and management job tasks could also theoretically be completed by AI.
Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, according to its website, puts computer programmers and computer service representatives at the most risk due to their exposure to AI and the repetitive nature of their tasks.
Dr. Wei Sun, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is the director of Siemens Digital Grid Lab at UCF. He said he sees a decline in the near future for labor markets for certain industries, but predicts that as the tools develop, we will find a need for a variety of talents.
“It will come back when we figure out what types of talents we need to make better use of AI as the tools get better, which depends on the industry to evolve and for our education system to catch up,” Sun said in a text message.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put out a separate report in 2025 detailing the potential impacts of AI on the job market from 2023 to 2033. The report made projections for careers in computer, legal, business and financial, and architecture/engineering occupations, finding that each category will grow by about 4% by 2033.
In comparison, the agency’s 2010-2020 expected occupational growth chart for the same categories ranged from 10.8% growth to more than 22% by 2020.
More optimistically, the World Economic Forum estimates that 40% of working hours could be covered by large language models and that workforces may have to focus more on “reskilling” their employees to work alongside AI. The same report emphasizes a shift toward specialization in the labor market as it predicts a 40% jump in machine learning specialists and a 30-35% increase in “big-data analyst” careers.
Paul Dumont, an AI project leader for Orange County, said in an email that the county is taking a practical, structured approach to AI and does not see it as a short-term trend. He pointed to the county’s development of an enterprise AI strategy, the fleshing out of a governance framework and a specific roadmap to define approved uses and decision-making responsibilities.
“We are not approaching AI as a free-for-all,” Dumont said. “Orange County sees AI becoming part of the local economy in the same way other major technologies have: first as a productivity tool, then as a business capability, and eventually as part of how organizations compete and grow.”
Major technological shifts represent a broad period of change, bringing about both difficulties and opportunities. The question for a lot of young graduates in the AI age quickly morphs from where to look for professional opportunities to which ones are left.