Will ChatGPT Affect Oil and Gas Jobs?

There is absolutely no question that ChatGPT, and artificial intelligence, generally speaking, as it evolves, will affect oil and gas jobs.

That’s what Gladney B. Darroh, the founder and president of Houston based Piper-Morgan Search, told Rigzone, adding that “it will reduce the overall need for people”.

“To understand what’s coming to oil and gas you need look no further than a recent New York Times article about A.I.’s performance in more than 275,000 breast cancer cases – ‘A.I. software matched the performance of human radiologists when acting as the second reader of mammography scans. It also cut down on radiologist’s workloads by at least 30 percent and the technology increased the cancer detection rate by 13 percent because more malignancies were found by A.I.,’” Darroh noted.

“This is just the beginning for A.I.’s impact in the health care industry. Extrapolating from this article, it is not any great leap of logic to understand clearly how A.I. application in health care is a precursor for the oil and gas industry,” he added.

“The fact is, anything in the energy industry that requires data to be interpreted, measured, or quantified, A.I. will be able to do all of it more accurately and much faster – if not now, soon, as in the next five to 10 years,” Darroh continued.

The Piper-Morgan Search founder highlighted that he recently contributed to a Rigzone article focusing on the ability of the energy industry to attract enough young people, and noted that, at the time, he commented that the oil and gas industry would always come up with the right mix of incentives to get new grads in the door.

“I still believe this is true,” he told Rigzone.

“However, with the advent of A.I., in the years ahead the oil and gas industry and many others will not to need to hire people of any experience level at the same historical rate,” he added.

Offering his view, Joshua May, the CEO and Technical Recruiting Consultant for HireStrong LLC, an affiliate of Sanford Rose Associates, told Rigzone that ChatGPT will affect all jobs.

“I believe it will affect oil and gas jobs as well,” he said.

“Primarily, right now, ChatGPT is great for creating content to release for marketing purposes, job ads, standard operating procedures, etc. Anything written you can get a great outline started within ChatGPT,” he added.

“However, you need knowledge of what you are doing to go through after the fact and clean it up. ChatGPT will not replace jobs wholesale (some, maybe) but instead make the work we do every day easier,” he continued.

ChatGPT can also help analyze data, create formulas, and create code, May highlighted, adding that all of this “can affect oil and gas”.

“The only thing holding ChatGPT back from the oil and gas industry is the people in the oil and gas industry not adopting the technology,” he said.

“Some technology takes years to adopt (and let’s face it, many companies, including oil and gas, still use antiquated systems from before 2000). So while there may be a slow drive to adopt this new technology, those who do it now will be ahead of their competitors,” May added.

OpenAI, which describes itself as an A.I. research and deployment company whose mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, introduced ChatGPT on November 30, 2022.

In a statement posted on its website on November 30 last year, OpenAI said ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.

To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com