{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/media-and-communication-workers-all-other/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Media and Communication Workers, All Other", "soc_code": "27-3099", "category": "Media", "us_employment": 19590, "median_annual_wage": 73620 }, "verdict": "COOKED", "risk_resistance": 30, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 8, "embodiment": 6, "liability_shield": 1, "trust_premium": 8, "judgment_accountability": 7 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Drafting the weekly newsletter, cutting captions to reading speed, pulling a clip report, and re-sizing the same post for four platforms are all things a model does at first-draft quality today — the 8 rather than a 3 comes from the residual slice this code hides: standing at the check-in table at a community forum, chasing an interpreter who no-showed, and coaxing a quote out of a program director who won't answer email.", "embodiment": "There is a real body in this job on event days — hauling banners and A/V, staffing a booth, shooting phone video at a site visit, sitting in a booth doing live CART or realtime captioning — but it's episodic and in controlled rooms your employer booked, which is why it lands at 6 and not at the 13+ of someone whose worksite is a roof or a roadside.", "liability_shield": "Nothing here is licensed: there is no statute a communications coordinator can be struck off under, CPACC or a CRC captioning credential is a hiring preference at best, and when a post goes wrong the exposure sits with the agency, the executive director, or general counsel — not with the person who queued it.", "trust_premium": "The newsletter subscriber and the follower have no idea who assembled what they read, so most output is genuinely anonymous; the 8 is carried by the narrower book of people who do know your name — the neighborhood association chair, the volunteer roster, the reporter who calls you first, the deaf attendee who trusts your captioning — relationships that are real but transferable to your replacement within a quarter.", "judgment_accountability": "Most calls run against a style guide, a brand kit, an approved messaging document, and a posting calendar, but you regularly decide alone and fast whether to post during a local tragedy, how to phrase a correction, and what gets escalated to the director before it goes live — discretion with reputational stakes, exercised inside a chain of approval, which is a 7 rather than a 14." }, "rationale": "This is a residual BLS bucket — communications coordinators, media specialists, program assistants, captioners, content and outreach staff who don't fit the writer, editor, PR, or broadcast codes. The modal worker's day is drafting copy and newsletters, formatting and posting content, tracking coverage, transcribing and captioning, and coordinating logistics over email — nearly all of which current models do at usable quality. What persists is the in-person, relationship-carrying slice: running an event, managing a stakeholder or community group, and owning what goes out under an organization's name.", "outlook": "By the mid-2030s the drafting-and-posting half of these roles is largely absorbed into one person plus AI tooling, and the surviving jobs cluster around live coordination and named external relationships.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Accessibility law enforcement that makes a named human responsible for caption/description accuracy: DOJ's 2024 ADA Title II web/mobile rule (28 CFR Part 35, WCAG 2.1 AA compliance by 2026-27) plus FCC caption quality rules already push public entities and broadcasters toward certified human review of machine captions. A CART/CDI-style credential requirement (like court reporter or ADA-mandated qualified interpreter rules) attaching personal certification to live captioning would create a real signature requirement for the captioner slice of this bucket.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Disclosure/attestation regimes for organizational communications: state political-ad AI disclosure laws (e.g. California AB 2839, Texas SB 751) and FTC endorsement/testimonial rules increasingly require a named human to attest that published content is not deceptive synthetic media. If employers formalize a 'human sign-off of record' on outbound comms to preserve insurance or FTC defensibility, the coordinator who presses publish becomes the attesting party.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift: this bucket genuinely has two tiers. If the drafting/formatting/posting/monitoring tier is fully absorbed, the surviving role is event execution, stakeholder and community management, and crisis judgment about what the organization says — work that is not text generation. This raises the score of the remaining job while shrinking headcount, so it is not good news for the count.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Formal escalation ownership: organizations adopting AI content governance policies (e.g. the growing pattern of newsroom and agency AI-use policies requiring a designated human approver before publication, and NIST AI RMF-aligned internal controls) that name a communications staffer as the accountable reviewer for reputational risk decisions.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "embodiment", "change": "Concentration of the role into physical event and field work — venue logistics, on-site A/V, community meetings, in-person outreach in unpredictable settings — as remote-composable tasks disappear.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 } ], "ceiling_note": "Realistic ceiling is modest. Trust premium has no plausible route: buyers of newsletters, social posts, and coverage reports do not pay for human authorship and rarely know who wrote it. The liability and accountability levers attach to narrow slices (captioning, political ads, publish authority) that cover a minority of this residual bucket, and every lever above is compatible with the occupation shrinking sharply while the survivors' scores rise." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 21510, "wage": 47900 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 20420, "wage": 48330 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 25160, "wage": 47580 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 20940, "wage": 49730 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 16540, "wage": 49900 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 23780, "wage": 65000 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 23230, "wage": 61900 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 23590, "wage": 71770 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 19590, "wage": 73620 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -8.9, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }