‘It’s already saved thousands’: how ChatGPT and generative AI can save you money
Artificial intelligence has become incredibly sophisticated and accessible over the last six months. See how people are using chat bots and generative AI to save money and shake up business.
National
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Australians are saving thousands of dollars by turning to online bots such as ChatGPT to draft legal documents, write resumes, and learn new skills.
It comes as the artificial intelligence tool has been labelled “bigger than the launch of the internet”, set to spark widespread job disruption and an overhaul of business plans worldwide.
Tech entrepreneur Matt Barrie and futurist Anders Sorman-Nilsson are among those who have already begun using ChatGPT for legal work.
Mr Barrie, chief executive of freelancing marketplace Freelancer.com, has drafted and amended contacts, terms and conditions, and cease and desist letters.
“Since lawyers cost $300 to $700-plus an hour, it’s already saved thousands for me and will save a lot more in the future,” Mr Barrie said.
Mr Sorman-Nilsson, a trained but non-practising lawyer, was also impressed by the bot’s basic legal contracts.
“When I had my law firm draft up new Covid-risk specific client contracts, they wanted to charge me $10,000 for three user-unfriendly contracts filled with legalese and I had to spend hours and hours explaining my business model and channel partnerships,” he said.
While AI-generated contracts required “a few tweaks and a human in the loop”, he said they were more time efficient and cost effective.
Law Council of Australia president Luke Murphy said the use of AI in the legal profession was still in its infancy and required significant human consideration to ensure outputs were correct and usable.
“Where these tools are utilised by lawyers, this must be done with extreme care,” he said.
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, has been trained on large amounts of data from the internet pre-September 2021, and is freely accessible online.
With simple instructions in plain language, it can produce copy from poems and emails to blogs and marketing materials – and can turn a few dot points about a person’s work experience into a fleshed-out CV.
It can also write, correct and explain computer code, helping to train software developers and data analysts without the need for expensive courses.
Mr Barrie said ChatGPT and the technology behind it was “one of the greatest advances in technology in history”.
“This will be bigger, in the next 12 months, than the launch of the internet, commercially,” he said.
Other popular generative AI tools include Dall-E 2, Midjourney and Leonardo, which allow users to describe images down to the artistic style then produce them free of copyright and ready to be used for anything from wall art to book illustrations and advertising.
“Every single white collar job can now effectively be done by generative AI and in many circumstances, done better – it’s going to change absolutely everything,” Mr Barrie said.
“I don’t think the world is ready for what’s happening.
“Every single company should be ripping up their business plan and starting again.”
On Freelancer.com, AI-related job listings have ballooned, with projects such as fashion recommendation systems, Lego sorting algorithms, and automated systems for scripting, creating and publishing YouTube shorts.
However, more jobs were likely to be lost than created in the wake of the new technology – at least in the short term.
Graphic designers, copy writers, software engineers, fashion models, executive assistants, bookkeepers, accountants and legal clerks were among the professions in the firing line.
University of Oxford professor and co-founder of AI company Mind Foundry Michael Osborne said rapid advances in AI were “almost certain” to impact employment in the short term.
“In the longer term, these disruptions settle down,” he said.
“But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that short-term disruption can actually be really harmful and we don’t know exactly what ‘short term’ means.
“Technologies rarely entirely replace occupations but instead transform many occupations.”
In 2013, Prof Osborne co-authored research that predicted highly creative or social occupations would be largely immune from automation – but generative AI is now set to disrupt even these roles.
“It would still be ill-advised to use it for sophisticated socially intelligent tasks such as for negotiations of an important deal, for mentoring or for leadership,” he said.
Demographer and co-founder of Demographics Group Simon Kuestenmacher was optimistic about AI’s disruption of the workforce.
“Work finds a way and creates new tasks,” he said.
“It might automate contact centres but that’s a good thing – if you have a simple question such as ‘When will my Qantas miles be in my account?’, why should a human waste their life on that?
“Even if we put a couple of workers out of business, I am not nervous about that at all because the world is running out of workers, not jobs.
“Workers need to get much more productive to make sure we will have enough workers to look after our old people, so (AI) is an important step in the right direction.”
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