From copywriting to design ideas, from media interviews to product promotions, the involvement of AI seems to be changing people’s definition of “professionalism”. However, this change is not entirely positive: on the one hand, AI improves work efficiency, and on the other hand, it also brings about the deconstruction of professional skills and the questioning of professional value. This article delves into the impact of AI on professionalism in the workplace through multiple real-life cases, and the deep-seated question behind this impact – is AI killing “professionalism”?
Are you forced to use AI at work?
In the past two years, AI has rushed into the workplace like a torrent. Copywriting, planning, design, reporter…… It seems that no position is “spared”. At first, everyone was very excited, thinking that AI could help them improve efficiency and broaden the boundaries of their capabilities. But slowly, as AI is used more and more, more and more professionals begin to find out that the problem is wrong.
It seems that the “professional skills” we once relied on for survival are becoming more and more “useless”, and the work we have worked hard to do is easily overturned by the leader’s sentence “let AI change again”.
“Professional” is gradually being deconstructed in the AI era.
For example, at the beginning of this year, a doctor in Guangdong posted a video on social media saying that after he prescribed medicine to patients, patients questioned that his treatment plan was wrong because DeepSeek did not say so.
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This scene is actually very similar to the Internet era, when a widely circulated joke on the Internet was that doctors hated people who came to see a doctor with Baidu the most. After the doctor prescribes medicine to you, you say, “I see that Baidu says that this disease is not cured in this way.” ”
Nowadays, the role of “Baidu” has been replaced by “AI”, and the structure of society for “professional” is becoming more and more serious.
1. Let AI change it again!
“You upload this manuscript to AI and let it polish it again.”
This is the most repeated words of the leader when Luo Zheng reports on work in the past two months. There are no opinions, no problems, and no direction for modification, just blindly let him use AI to modify it again.
Luo Zheng is a brand copywriter for a technology company in Beijing, and his previous work was smooth, but since the leader shared an article in a WeChat group at the beginning of the year about how employees use AI to improve efficiency, such a nightmare began.
“The leader asked each of us to use AI, not to write the manuscript ourselves, but to use AI as much as possible and make requirements for AI.” Luo Zheng said.
“The leader himself also uses AI, no matter what he does, he has to go to DeepSeek to ask, and now he has a sense of fortune-telling when he sees his work.”
▲ Contemplative Leonardo da Vinci, the picture is generated by ChatGPT
Of course, if it is just a request to use AI, it will not have much impact on Luo Zheng, after all, he will also use a lot of AI tools in his daily work. What really angered Luo Zheng was the disrespect shown by leaders to their work after using AI.
“Our company has a series of new products to be announced recently, but after all the publicity manuscripts and product introductions are given to the leader, he will easily vote them to AI, and then feed you back an unrecognizable version and ask you to do so.”
“There is a feeling of being plagiarized by AI.” Luo Zheng believes that AI is essentially correcting their work, but leaders will not remember their work in the end, but will only remember that you did not do well in a day or two, and AI will do it in a few minutes.
And Luo Zheng believes that the content modified by AI is not perfect. “Copywriting and manuscripts themselves have a lot of subjective elements, different people have different preferences, and although some content of AI is given well, it does not necessarily fit the established propaganda tone.”
“But the leader won’t care about this, he will only think that the content of AI is better, but we can’t ignore it, we have KPIs, so for the sake of effect, we have to adjust the delivery strategy, which is really for this plate of vinegar, and wrapped dumplings.”
A similar problem also happened to Yu Qing, who works in the media, and after a recent interview, Yu Qing organized the QA version to confirm the interviewee as usual.
But what Yu Qing didn’t expect was that what the interviewee gave him back was an almost completely new content. The interviewee also proudly told her that this was re-modified by him with AI, and said that this would be more conducive to dissemination and more people would read it. But Yu Qing looked at the feedback like a meeting minutes manuscript, and she didn’t figure out why this version could be more disseminated.
Similar things do not only happen in text work scenes, but Zhang Yan, who is a designer in a certain company, also encounters similar situations. “Leaders have been asking us to use AI to generate design materials recently, but our designs are mainly event posters and on-site main KV and other content, which are not like works of art, and AI is not very easy to generate.”
Before May Day, Zhang Yan used AI to generate materials for May Day festival posters, but the leaders had ideas about the specific content of the AI picture, such as character images, positions, clothing, etc. These pictures moved the whole body, and in order to achieve the effect of satisfactory leaders, they could only draw cards repeatedly, and it took a whole day to generate materials at that time.
“Since we started using AI, the leaders have always PUd us, saying that our work is not as good as AI.” Luo Zheng said that AI has indeed changed the way we work, but it has not changed for the better.
2. The deconstructed “profession”
Through these cases, we will find a fact that is difficult for many people to accept, that is, in the era of AI, people’s professional abilities have been deconstructed.
Before this, whether it was exporting poster design, PR manuscripts, or interview content of reporters, certain thresholds were required, such as certain professional skills and certain experience accumulation.
But with AI, whether you have relevant work experience before or even whether you have knowledge of the job or not, you can quickly output a result that looks good through AI.
The deconstruction of professional abilities has greatly enhanced many people’s abilities and grown into super individuals. But on the other hand, he also gives many people the illusion that “I can go on and I can do it” and then despise the profession.
For example, the aforementioned interviewee Yu Qing used AI to modify the manuscript, or Luo Zheng’s leader used AI to modify the brand content.
This includes two levels of issues, the first is the issue of professionalism. Professionalism here does not refer to the ability to complete tasks, but to the cognition and thinking behind completing the work.
Taking media interviews as an example, each media has its own unique perspective and style, its own established readership, and different communication points according to different events. Therefore, behind the choice of content form and expression focus is a complex decision that synthesizes all information.
Although AI can quickly generate content, it obviously does not obtain this complete background information, so even if the AI-generated content is good, it may not be suitable for the media, and the same is true for corporate promotional content.
The second is the question of whether the AI’s answers are truly professional. In the past two years, due to the expansion of AI publicity, many people regard the results output by AI as a standard answer, but in fact, in many cases, the results output by AI are not even reference answers.
This is because AI also pleases users. At the end of April, after OpenAI updated ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT was criticized by users for overly pleasing users. For example, if a user proposes a business plan to “sell feces”, ChatGPT will also praise it as a genius idea. This excessive flattery led OpenAI to withdraw the update.
Therefore, many people feel that the content output by AI is very satisfactory, and the fundamental reason is that this content is tailored by AI for you, but personal likes and dislikes obviously do not represent the likes and dislikes of the public.
However, in practice, people in leadership positions often ignore these issues, using AI to impose personal likes and dislikes on the likes and dislikes of the public, leading to contempt for the profession and ultimately making wrong decisions.
At the same time, this behavior can also have a negative impact on employees, such as employees will feel that their profession is not valued, and at the same time, they will feel that they will be replaced by AI at any time, which will eventually lead to employee resignation, or negative work attitude, etc.
The way to bridge this difference is to let people who are truly professional and understand the needs of the market and the public to guide AI to complete the work, so that it can truly meet the needs of the market and the public.
3. Conclusion
Of course, AI’s deconstruction of professionalism is also manifested in many aspects.
For example, many self-media are now very popular in the style of DeepSeek, when a hot event occurs, send the event to DeepSeek for comment, and then publish it as article content.
In this way, DeepSeek has gradually been regarded by many as an absolute authority and a new celebrity quote. In the past, we quoted the classics, all of which were Confucius, Mencius, Shakespeare….. but now they are all DeepSeek, Doubao, and Kimi……
This situation is even more serious in the sinking market, and people are less and less engaged in independent thinking and independent judgment, gradually becoming AI respondents.
This situation is essentially the result of a wide range of technological equality. That is, the deconstruction of professionalism is actually brought about by technical equality. Technological equality is certainly a good thing, but again, there are two sides to everything.
From a social point of view, the Internet may be a better case. Today, many people still miss the high-quality content atmosphere on online platforms in the classical Internet era, such as Zhihu before 2017, Tianya Forum before 2008, etc., when online platforms were full of friendly social atmosphere and high-quality, professional and in-depth discussions.
However, with the popularization of the Internet, more and more people poured in, Tianya Forum still declined, Zhihu gradually became a collection of pretending stories, and platforms such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu were full of anger, abuse, disagreements and quarrels.
The popularity of the Internet allows everyone to speak out and be seen; But at the same time, a lot of unthoughtful, uncensored content is published. So we got an Internet environment that was completely different from the classical Internet era.
It’s hard to say which internet was better in the past or now, but there is no doubt that similar trends will surely be reproduced in the AI scene. When AI makes it easy for more people to acquire abilities, but they do not have the corresponding professionalism of this ability, what will await the world?
AI can replace human work, but it should not replace human thinking.
