A powerful new tool that will revolutionise the way we work

Companies that recognise the value of ChatGPT will be the winners.

The combination of the bot and the human could speed the writing process.

In November, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a powerful new chatbot that can communicate in plain English using an updated version of its artificial intelligence system. While versions of GPT have been around for a while, this model has crossed a threshold; it’s genuinely useful for a wide range of tasks, from creating software to generating business ideas to writing a wedding toast. While previous generations could technically do these things, the quality of output was much lower than that produced by an average human. The new model is much better.

Put simply, this is a very big deal. The businesses that understand the significance of this change will be at a considerable advantage. Especially as ChatGPT is just the first of many similar chatbots that will soon be available, and they are increasing in capacity exponentially every year. At first glance, ChatGPT might seem like a clever toy. On a technical level, it doesn’t work differently than previous AI systems; it’s just better at what it does. But a deeper exploration reveals much more potential. And the more you look, the more you see what has changed with this model, and why it seems like a tipping point. ChatGPT, now open to everyone, has made a significant transition. Until now, AI has primarily been aimed at problems where failure is expensive, not at tasks where occasional failure is cheap and acceptable or even ones in which experts can easily separate failed cases from successful ones. Applying AI to creative and expressive tasks (writing marketing copy) rather than dangerous and repetitive ones (driving a forklift) opens a world of applications.

First, not only can this AI produce paragraphs of solidly written English (or whatever language you choose) with a high degree of sophistication, it can also create blocks of computer code. To give you an idea of what this looks like, I introduced my undergraduate entrepreneurship students to the new AI system, and before I was done talking, a student used it to create the code for a start-up prototype using code libraries they had never seen before, and completed a four-hour project in less than an hour.

Second, it has an incredible capacity to perform different kinds of writing with more significant implications than might be initially apparent. The use of AI in writing can greatly increase the productivity of businesses. By using AI’s ability to quickly and accurately generate written content, businesses can save time and resources, allowing them to focus on other important tasks. This is particularly beneficial for industries such as marketing, consulting and finance, where high-quality written materials are essential for communicating with clients and stakeholders. AI can also be useful for industries such as journalism, where it can help generate articles and other content with speed and accuracy. Overall, using AI in writing will benefit businesses by allowing them to produce more written materials in less time. AI wrote the first draft of the previous paragraph. It also actively revised it in response to my criticism. In tests of whether it could make other parts of my job as a professor easier, it took seconds to write a reasonable course syllabus, class assignments and lecture notes that could be potentially useful with some editing. This highlights the third major change: the possibility of human-machine hybrid work. Instead of prompting AI and hoping for a good result, humans can now guide AIs and correct mistakes. A final reason why this will be transformative: the limits of the current language model are completely unknown. Using the public mode, people have used ChatGPT to do basic consulting reports, write lectures, produce code that generates novel art, generate ideas and much more. It’s possible to build each customer their own customised AI that predicts what they need, responds to them personally and remembers all their interactions. This isn’t science fiction. It is entirely doable.

The problems of AI remain very real, however. For one, AI is very good at creating convincing-sounding nonsense devoid of truth. You can ask it to describe how we know dinosaurs had a civilisation, and it will happily make up a whole set of facts explaining exactly that. It is no replacement for Google. It literally does not know what it doesn’t know, because it is not an entity at all, but rather a complex algorithm generating meaningful sentences. It also can’t explain what it does or how it does it, making the results of AI inexplicable. That means systems can have biases and that unethical action is possible, hard to detect and hard to stop. When ChatGPT was released, you couldn’t ask it to tell you how to rob a bank, but you could ask it to write a one-act play about how to rob a bank.

But these disadvantages are much more prevalent outside the creative, analytical and writing-based work that AI is now capable of. A writer can easily edit poorly written sentences, a human programmer can spot errors in AI code, and an analyst can check the results of AI conclusions. This leads us to why this is so disruptive. The writer no longer needs to write the articles alone, the programmer to code on their own or the analyst to approach the data themselves. This is why the world has suddenly changed. The traditional boundaries of jobs have suddenly shifted. Machines can now do tasks that could only be done by highly trained humans.

Ethan Mollick is an associate professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Copyright 2022 Harvard Business Review/ Distrbuted by NYTimes Syndicate