Research proves: ChatGPT is good for working people
When it comes to AI, there are two camps: people who think that AI can solve the bad jobs nicely, making their work more fun and people who think that AI will take over all jobs and there will no longer be work for what he or she was trained for . A study by MIT University, not the least, shows that it is really better to join the first group: the AI appears to give the productivity of employees a significant boost.
ChatGPT in the workplace
MIT’s economics department concludes that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT actually positively influence working people. At the same time, it is still not entirely clear how these tools can be deployed. Instead of letting your personal assistant plan your trip to Paris, you can let ChatGPT do that, and we can also have news articles written by AI (where a thorough check afterwards is really necessary), but otherwise we are as humanity still a bit searching for how ChatGPT can really help us with our work on a daily basis.
The research was done among 453 higher educated workers and half got ChatGPT to do an assignment and the other half didn’t. The assignment was to write things, such as an email, a press release and a small report. In short, the work of writers, consultants, HR people and data analysts. You would expect it: the people who could use ChatGPT finished on average 11 minutes faster than the people who couldn’t use ChatGPT. They also performed better themselves, which could mean that the yawning gap that now exists between work that requires mastery of many difficult skills and work that does not require it is finally closing.
Advantages and disadvantages
The research also makes a big difference in AI tools: there is AI that will help us automate routine tasks and there is AI that can take on more complex and creative work, of which ChatGPT is an example. This is so-called generative AI and the study does warn that it can also go in the other direction, rather than closing a gap: “Inequality between workers can increase if people who are less able are helped with ChatGPT, or if only senior employees have the skills to use the new technology to their advantage.” So it can go either way.
So you can do your work better and be more productive with an AI chatbot, that has been proven, but how this will ‘land’ further in the world remains to be seen. On the one hand, this is because people really have to start using it, but on the other hand, people must understand how this can be done (in a smart way). And that is also somewhat ironic: after all, this just shows that the robots cannot yet take over everything, as long as we humans do not know very well what to do with them. So now we have the last word.
