Don’t worry too much about generative AI, claims the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a new study, the American technology institute shows hard data that indicates a productivity boost for those who use ChatGPT and the like.
Will generative AI applications à la ChatGPT take away our jobs soon, or will they help us make us more productive? The answer to that crucial question leans toward the second, suggests a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In an experiment, the results of which were just published in the scientific journal Science, MIT researchers got 453 long-skilled employees in companies from various industries to write a series of short texts, from a press release to a memo to an “email message of a delicate nature.”. The kind of texts that are written every day in a professional environment. After an initial text that they all had to write themselves, half of the participants in the study were allowed to continue using ChatGPT, and the other suckers had to continue working without help.
What turned out? Those allowed to use the language model completed their tasks on average 11 minutes faster, and the result of their second task (the one with ChatGPT) was about 18 percent improved in quality. The answers the participants subsequently gave to survey questions were even more important than the hard data about productivity: those who had worked with the chatbot also felt more productive and enjoyed their tasks more. Two weeks after the experiment, they indicated they were twice as likely to use ChatGPT and its associates in their job (although that dropped to 1.6 times after two months).
The researchers’ Preliminary conclusions drawn from their study are that generative AI can assist rather than replace human employees, but also that the ChatGPTs of this world can erase employee inequalities. Although that depends on how good employees become at using these types of tools to fill gaps in their skillset. “Employee disparities may decrease as lower-capacity employees are more supported by ChatGPT or increase as higher-capacity employees learn to benefit even more from the new technology,” the study reads.
