AI is increasing in the workplace and people love it. Conor Grennan’s work as dean of students at NYU’s Stern School of Business is partially or entirely automatable. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are ideal for various jobs, including brainstorming and planning.
But rather than fearing for his job security in the face of AI, Grennan has become an advocate for the benefits that AI can bring to the workplace. He compares the chance to work with AI technology to striking it rich.
He explained to Vox, “It feels like the Gold Rush, like there’s a bunch of people getting to California and seeing little flakes of gold in the river.”
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Some of the new AI-powered workflow implemented by Grennan is quite elementary. He drops email chains into ChatGPT, Bing, or Bard (he uses them all) to find information about a student or deliverables he needs to act on quickly. However, he acknowledges that relying on this technology solely for mundane tasks is the technological equivalent of pulling out an iPhone to use its flashlight. He is more comfortable using AI for those tasks than doing them himself.
Grennan could, for instance, ask a computer to recommend five suitable locations in lower Manhattan on a Tuesday evening to consider how young people in Ohio might contribute to solving the climate crisis or to define an application programming interface (API). If he doesn’t like the answers he’s getting, he’ll keep asking and refining the questions until he does. Grennan believes that he can improve in all aspects of his life and work by having regular conversations with the AI.
“Instead of the mundane, “I’ve been assigned a task, and now I must complete that task,” we have “I’ve been assigned a task. How can we see this from other perspectives? In what ways will this enhance my life? Grennan questioned how he could improve his intelligence. He has recently been promoted to the position of head of generative AI at Stern. He is now working on an AI initiative for the MBA program to familiarize students, faculty, and administration with the use of AI in the workplace.
Making ChatGPT and its improved successor GPT-4, OpenAI has a vested interest in exaggerating the capabilities of their technology. Still, a recent study by the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI found that half of the workers could have more than half of their tasks exposed to large language models like ChatGPT. Financial analysts, web designers, legal researchers, and journalists, among others, were among the most vulnerable high-wage degree-required professions to the onslaught of technological extinction. The study acknowledged that time-saving technologies like ChatGPT could play a role in the automation of these jobs, but it stopped short of making that claim. However, it will affect them in some way.
Despite the hype surrounding artificial intelligence’s purported ability to wipe out human employment, Americans like Grennan, whose jobs involve tasks that programs like ChatGPT can perform, are adopting AI to eliminate mundane tasks, free up mental space for innovation, and advance their careers. Copywriters in marketing use it to improve their work, while developers use it to tackle challenging projects or understand code written in unfamiliar languages. It’s become the de facto method for drafting summary emails and standard document templates.
Where others see danger, these employees see opportunity. And they hope that their tool expertise and distinctively human skills will keep them employed even as AI improves. Over 40% of Americans reported using generative AI technology at work as recently as January, which is likely higher now. But roughly half of Americans are concerned that AI will hurt employment opportunities in their country.
We have yet to learn how exactly technologies based on artificial intelligence will change the nature of work. There is concern that employers will hire fewer people to complete the same amount of work if new technologies shorten the time it takes to complete everyday tasks from days to hours. It is hoped that, despite the potential for disruption, the latest technology will lead to more and better jobs, just as the advent of the personal computer and the internet did not eliminate professional occupations.
American workers who have adopted this technology thus far appear pleased with it. They aren’t at all resemble frogs in a pot of water.
Sayonara, boredom!
Remember that even the most desirable jobs come with their share of unpleasant responsibilities. That’s why workers have started implementing AI there.
Zero One Digital Media was founded by filmmaker and entrepreneur Colin McAuliffe, who has been using the artificial intelligence software DALL-E to create visuals for use in business pitches. He doesn’t have to waste time browsing endless stock images to find the one he wants; instead, he can just tell the program what he needs, like “a photograph of a lemon,” and it will generate one for him.
“It was something I either detested doing or would force other people to do for me,” he admitted. And now I can do it on my own, and it’s fun.
While McAuliffe hasn’t yet had ChatGPT write scripts for him, he plans to use AI more frequently to create shooting schedules and plan trips for his company. A client recently gave him a script written by ChatGPT.
He explained that he could not produce as many videos because of other obligations.
People claim that by employing these methods, they can devote more time to activities they enjoy.
In the past, self-employed product designer Vanessa Bowen dreaded writing the copy for their app prototypes. If the text were incorrect, customers would focus on that instead of the app’s user interface, which could derail the interaction. Bowen now provides ChatGPT with details about the client, the service, and the text box type to have it generate the appropriate response.
“It spits out something easy and brief that removes some of that mental strain,” they explained. That way, Bowen can devote more time to doing what they enjoy most: designing.
They said, “I find that we are stuck in the mundane activities of the day-to-day that could be automated, which then, in turn, could free up our whole lives.” Time for “other things like being more creative or not working so much” would increase.
This is a common complaint from office workers, and it’s why tech giants like Microsoft are investing so heavily in AI for productivity apps: Not all labor is created equal. Microsoft promises that its employees will soon be able to ask AI-powered tools like Excel and PowerPoint to perform complex calculations, create presentations, and summarize Outlook emails in seconds while conversing with them as if they were human.
It needs to be clarified, however, whether workers will devote their extra time to the aspects of their jobs that they enjoy or waste it instead. It’s also possible they’re just using this technology to create more busy work for everyone else. Consider the hilarious cartoon in which one character uses AI to turn a bullet point into a lengthy email, only to have the recipient reply by asking for the email to be condensed into a single bullet point.
Gaining Promotions at Work
Concerns have been voiced about the future of computer programmers in light of generative AI. These tools can often instantly generate perfectly functional code using natural language, so it’s fair to wonder what this means for the highly compensated people who previously did the same thing more slowly.
Instead, the programmers and coders we spoke with saw the technology as something akin to having an incredibly bright intern or assistant at their disposal, helping them do their jobs better.
According to Victor Boutté, a software engineer and tech lead manager at video hosting company Wistia, AI tools like GitHub Copilot help him be more productive by suggesting how to finish the code he has started. Boutté, a remote worker, compares using AI tools to chatting with a colleague who is both exceptionally bright, has conveniently read through his code, and has endless time for his questions.
I treat it much like I would a colleague in the engineering field. He said, “It’s allowing me to develop these ideas fully, and the responses are instantaneous.
AI speeds up Boutté’s coding and expands the scope of what he can create.
I’ve worked in this industry for a long time and have never seen anything like this. And it gets my mind working on what I can make with this kind of technology,” he said. I found it very motivating.
Developer and researcher Simon Willison are able to be more ambitious thanks to AI tools because he spends less time trying to figure things out. That frees him up to try labor-intensive endeavors he might have passed up before.
Willison recently pitched in to help his wife with her pottery endeavor. She was interested in measuring how quickly a kiln cooled down after being heated in a microwave to get a sense of how hot it got. She had to keep checking the kiln’s temperature every few minutes for the next 90 minutes after she removed it from the microwave because she couldn’t use the thermometer there. Instead, Willison polled GPT-4 on how to segment the thermometer video into 10-second JPEG stills. He instructed it to interpret the images for temperature and plot the data over time. Willison is considering how he might assist journalists in applying this knowledge to issues like analyzing police body camera footage.
When presented with problems of this nature, I would typically think, “It’s going to take me an hour to figure this out. He instructed us to “just sit down next to the microwave and jot down the numbers.”
Workers are finding that generative AI can improve their performance even in less technical and more creative fields. Productive artificial intelligence (AI) is demonstrating its brand of creativity with the right prompts and freeing up human time for more creative endeavors.
OkCupid’s brand marketing and communications director, Michael Kaye, has been using generative AI to generate potential questions for in-app compatibility matching. Because OkCupid uses these questions to make matches, thinking of questions that shed light on what matters to people is crucial to the service’s success. Kaye was responsible for coming up with all of the new questions that OKCupid’s daters could answer at any given time. Since this was just one of many things Kaye had to do at work, having AI generate some questions freed him up to focus on other things. Additionally, he claimed that the AI’s questions, which were derived from the basic prompts “What would you ask on a date?” and “What would you ask on a dating app?” were quite good.
A question like “How do you balance your own needs with your partner in a relationship?” was among the first 10 AI-generated questions Kaye added to the dating service. “What do you look for in a lifelong companion?” and “Do you prefer the mornings or the evenings?” More than 675,000 users have replied to them since the end of January, indicating their popularity.
Kaye remarked, “They are high quality, especially considering how generic the prompt was.” They may seem trivial, but they strengthen relationships between people.
He plans monthly to expand the number of ChatGPT questions this year by using more targeted prompts.
The reasons why artificial intelligence won’t replace us anytime soon
Everyone we talked to acknowledged that generative AI could be a game-changer for certain occupations, but none saw any real risk to their jobs.
Machine learning engineer Santiago Valdarrama’s tweet that “AI will not replace you” was widely repeated. One who makes use of AI will.” They reasoned that they would be at an advantage if they mastered generative AI tools, even if doing so rendered some of their current work unnecessary.
“[Losing my job] was my primary concern when I first started using GPT-4. Stephanie Yamkovenko, group manager of the digital marketing team at Khan Academy, an education nonprofit that has partnered with GPT-4 maker OpenAI since September, said that it’s natural to feel threatened by new technology, especially technology that’s good at what you do.
But as she continued to use it, she realized its future importance in the writing and editing industries.
Recently, Yamkovenko and her small team were able to work on a much larger product launch than they had been able to in the past. Using ChatGPT, she produced more social media content, resulting in ten times as much website traffic for the business.
