Employers may begin to recognise the advantages of ChatGPT as well, which may jeopardise the jobs of their staff.
ChatGPT and its AI capabilities could assist writers and office workers in improving their writing quality and decreasing the amount of time spent on tasks, reducing busy work in favour of better, more productive work.
The MIT study that came to these conclusions, however, also warned that businesses could utilise AI to accelerate layoffs.
‘Experimental Evidence on the Productivity Impacts of Generative Artificial Intelligence,’ by Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang of MIT’s economics department, is a working paper that has not been peer-reviewed. Yet, the findings of ChatGPT’s AI chatbot technology are both fascinating and alarming, especially when the study considers how it affects workers.
According to the study, individuals who utilised ChatGPT lowered the time required to complete the tasks by about half (30 minutes to about 17 minutes). The evaluators’ grades on a 1-7 scale went from 4 to around 4.7, indicating an improvement in the work’s quality. Those that utilised the text editor saw a minor reduction in time spent, but also a reduction in job quality.
“College-educated professionals performing mid-level professional writing tasks experience substantial increases in productivity when given access to ChatGPT,” the authors concluded.
“The generative writing tool increases the output quality of low-ability workers while reducing their time spent, and it allows high-ability workers to maintain their quality standards while becoming significantly faster.”
Other intriguing study findings included the fact that approximately 68% of the workers simply copied and pasted ChatGPT’s output without modifying it.
Additionally, even though some testers spent more time editing ChatGPT’s responses, the study’s design (monitoring output on a minute-by-minute basis) revealed that those tested saw no gain in quality from editing ChatGPT’s work, despite spending more time doing so. This was true even when the study’s authors offered incentives for bettering the job.
“Post-treatment, the share of time spent writing a rough draft falls by more than half and the share of time spent editing more than doubles,” the study found.
Participants in the study also claimed that utilising ChatGPT boosted their job satisfaction by removing the “busy work” that can afflict some tasks, and they were willing to spend around 0.5% of their monthly wage for a ChatGPT subscription. (ChatGPT currently charges a monthly fee of $20 for paid access.)
However, those examined suggested that ChatGPT did not always know as much as they thought.
The authors also noted that employers may begin to recognise the advantages of ChatGPT, jeopardising the jobs of their staff.
