One year later, how has ChatGPT changed the way we work?
One year later, how has ChatGPT changed the way we work?
It’ll be one year this week since ChatGPT was released to the public, wowing the world with its wordsmithing abilities and instilling a sense of dread in many workers that it’s only a matter of time until we’re all replaced by the bots. While that hasn’t quite happened, ChatGPT has changed the world of work in the past year — for some.
Alessandro Perilli, CEO and chief of research at Unstable Reality, an R&D company focused on AI, has been tracking all the companies that have publicly acknowledged using generative artificial intelligence in operations.
“And we definitely have seen a massive adoption in a lot for a lot of different use cases,” he said.
Perilli’s list is now 120 long and includes financial institutions like JPMorgan, which uses AI to analyze statements by the Federal Reserve, and education companies like the Kahn Academy, which is using AI-generated lesson plans.
And it turns out, in some cases, humans and AI work well together.
“This is a real game changer,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and is a co-author of a working paper that looks at how human customer service agents used chatbot suggestions to make them better at their jobs.
“There was a higher customer satisfaction,” he said. “The agents working with it were less likely to quit.”
It’s an example of how the tool can make human workers more productive, Brynjolfsson said, rather than replacing them entirely. And that’s a common theme, per Shakked Noy, a Ph.D. student in economics at MIT who studied white-collar workers using a chatbot for writing tasks.
“Emails, writing short marketing, press releases, short reports, things like that,” he said.
AI could bring benefits to organizations and workers, Noy said, but it’s too early to say how a productivity bump will play out. “Some people might lose their jobs, new jobs might be created, the nature of existing jobs might change.”
It will take time for businesses to deploy the technology at a wide scale, according to Anton Korinek, an economics professor at the University of Virginia.
“There is a really big implementation gap between how many things generative AI can already do productively and how few things it’s actually used for,” he said.
The best thing workers can do is try the tech out for themselves, he added. “Frankly, it kind of felt like people had to go through the five stages of grief before using generative AI productively. So first, there was a lot of denial.”
Ultimately, Korinek said we’ve got to reach the stage of acceptance — that this is the world we’re living in.
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