- Millions of people are trying out ChatGPT.
- Insider spoke with six of them about how they're using the AI tool to make their jobs easier.
If ChatGPT doesn't take your job, you might be able to use it to make your work life a bit easier.
Since launching in November, the OpenAI-owned chatbot has taken the world by storm. It reached over 100 million active users by the end of January, according to a UBS report, making it perhaps the fastest-growing app in history.
The surge in popularity has led to plenty of speculation about what impact the emergence of ChatGPT and related AI tools will have on people's working lives. They could put some jobs at risk but also create new ones. They could make some industries more competitive but also make many jobs easier.
"It's absolutely true that AI applications like ChatGPT can very much improve workers' lives," Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution previously told Insider.
AI tools like ChatGPT aren't perfect, however, and can provide false information as a result. Additionally, most companies haven't established formal rules around employee use of ChatGPT.
But if used correctly, ChatGPT can help some workers with tasks and save them time while doing so. Insider spoke with six workers in sectors that include education and real estate who are using ChatGPT to make their jobs easier.
Realtors
James Crisp, a 39-year-old New Jersey realtor, told Insider he uses ChatGPT daily, and that it's an "essential part" of his business.
"I use ChatGPT to write marketing copy, real estate listings, social media content, build educational topics for my team and so many other things," he said, adding that, "I take what the AI gives me and make small tweaks to make it my own."
For others trying to figure out how to use ChatGPT at their jobs, Crisp says they should "think of things at your current job or in your life that you hate doing."
"Maybe you don't like writing emails or don't know what to say to your boss," he said. "ChatGPT can handle that. Think of all the endless mundane activities, and outsource them to AI."
A realtor with eXp Realty also used ChatGPT for a listing in Iowa that was highlighted in a CNN post.
"It's not perfect but it was a great starting point," JJ Johannes told CNN. "My background is in technology and writing something eloquent takes time. This made it so much easier."
Johannes, who also has a tech background, told Insider the chatbot is likely saving him about 15 to 20 minutes per listing description. With a goal of 50 property listings for 2023, this could add up to saving him roughly 17 hours this year if he continues to use it. He told Insider he used the chatbot initially to "basically wordsmith on the marketing side of coming up with a listing description." But, he has not only used ChatGPT to assist with some listings. He has used it on social media as he posts a few informational videos a day on different platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn.
He said he has learned "that one of the things with ChatGPT and other AI, the quality of your output is determined by the quality of your input. So I started to learn how to create a better input or prompt to ChatGPT to then get a better, more refined direct output that I can then use."
He said he will sometimes change some of the listings or social media posts created with the help of ChatGPT before posting them. Moving forward, one way he's considering using ChatGPT too is to assist with ads.
He thinks that ChatGPT will especially be helpful in marketing for realtors but it can also help on the social media side.
"In real estate, you do a lot of marketing of houses on social media, you do a lot of marketing of yourself on social media," Johannes said, "And so I think agents can and will leverage AI and ChatGPT in particular to help them with marketing things that maybe they struggle with coming up with the words for it or understanding the process of it as well."
Marketing Professionals
Tricia LaRue, a Missouri-based marketing professional who runs her own digital marketing agency, was "completely mind-blown" when she first asked ChatGPT to write a press release for a company she was working with, she said in a December TikTok video.
"It was a really quality press release that literally took 15 seconds to spit out," she said.
Now two months later, LaRue told Insider she uses ChatGPT "everyday" to help write proposals, video scripts, and press releases.
"It's helped to increase my efficiency and speed immensely," she said.
Tricia has a few pieces of advice for people who want to apply ChatGPT to their own jobs.
"Use ChatGPT as if it were your personal assistant, and dictate to it as you would a person that you were delegating a task to," she said. "The more descriptive you are in the prompt and the more details that are included, the better the output will be from ChatGPT."
Lawyers
James Peacock, a 27-year-old estate lawyer, recently asked ChatGPT to help him write a legally binding will for himself.
While he said the final draft "isn't perfect," he was very impressed with the AI's capabilities.
"The accuracy of the AI is mind-blowing to me," he wrote in a recent blog post. "It got 99% of what it said to me during this process entirely on point. It gave almost identical advice to that which I have given clients before."
But after spending more time trying out ChatGPT, Peacock told Insider that it "goes off the rails" quite often and that he thinks he got "quite lucky" the first time.
"When it comes to law, 80% correct isn't good enough and is unlikely to save much time," he said. "Attorneys will still have to review every word."
However, he did stumble upon what he thinks is ChatGPT's best use case for him in particular: summarizing.
"I've been copying the content of unreported cases into it and asking for a summary and it's able to pull out all the key facts and implications of a case, accurately, in seconds," he said. "This saves a lot of during research."
He thinks it could also potentially be useful for summarizing client meetings, though he hasn't been able to officially do this yet for client privacy reasons.
Teachers
Ted Pickett is an instructional coach at American International School in Abu Dhabi, meaning he helps teachers "with instructional guidance and support." He has tried out ChatGPT and has seen some potential use in the education sector.
"There's things that are great for the kids — some new innovation or something that's really good for student engagement, things like that — but it's never making life easier for the teachers," Pickett said.
Pickett added that in his almost two-decade career in education, ChatGPT "is the first thing that has the ability to take water from the bucket and to reduce the amount of busy work that teachers have."
"It can allow us to prioritize individual student focus instead of having to spend so much time doing lesson planning and things of that sort," he said.
Pickett, who said he thinks he's "just scratching the surface" of how to use the chatbot, has used it to assist in rewriting an English curriculum.
Additionally, he posted a video on Youtube with the title, "ChatGPT for Teachers - Doing an hour of work in 6 minutes!" The video included an example of how to use ChatGPT to help create different stations — group, pair, or individual exercises for students to do — related to a book for an English class. It also included how to then use it to help make prompts and pick a passage for one of those stations.
Pickett told Insider that having to create each station can take a long time, "and it kind of results in teachers not doing that sort of high engagement work because it takes so long to plan and it can literally be done in minutes and it's just a matter of evaluating what comes out."
Even though he said ChatGPT "can be intimidating just because of how powerful of a piece of software it is and just how suddenly it arrived in our lives," Pickett also told Insider that "I believe it's for the better of education in the long run."
Designers and branding specialists
David Litwin, CEO of Pure Fusion Media, detailed in a Medium post some of the tasks the design and branding company used ChatGPT in a week for and just how much time it ended up saving. That included saving four hours on "Inspirational Branding Copy for a Cookie Company" and eight to 10 hours on "Professionally Editing Brand Guide Copy for a Rental Housing Association."
"This week, I have personally saved approximately 30+ hours in my average fifty-hour workweek (I personally work from at least 7am to 6pm daily)," Litwin wrote.
Litwin, who told Insider he probably uses ChatGPT daily, has not only used it for the company but also as a writer.
"So the idea at first, for the first week, I used it as both a writing support and then also how can I transcend it," he said.
He also gave an example of how he used ChatGPT for a brand guide.
"Usually what happens for me is I'll write a brand guide, kind of free-associate the words, and then spend the next seven, eight hours perfecting all the language and making it grammatically correct," Litwin told Insider. "And in this case, all I had to do was free-associate it, write it once, and I budgeted the whole day for the project. So it was seven o'clock in the morning, took about an hour to write the entire brand guide out and then just ran into the ChatGPT and say, make this cleaner and sound more professional. And within five seconds, everything was all cleaned up and I was just able to kind of copy and paste it into the brand guide."
For Litwin, he sees the chatbot as "incredibly powerful." However, he does have some cautions about it in terms of creativity.
"I see ChatGPT like the Ring of Power from The Lord of the Rings," he told Insider. "It's incredibly powerful and useful, but if it becomes your sole source of creativity, you're done."
Has ChatGPT saved you time at work? How are you using ChatGPT for your work duties? Share your experience with these reporters at mhoff@insider.com and jzinkula@insider.com.