OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar AI tools may not replace jobs anytime soon. But they can help workers across many industries – from tech to media – do their jobs better and more quickly.
"It's almost like a bit of a productivity boost that some of these occupations might get," Anu Madgavkar, a partner at economic research firm McKinsey Global Institute, told Insider.
The buzzy conversational chatbot – which attracted one million users soon after its launch last November – has been used to generate real estate advice, provide tips on how to start a business, and even write music in the style of individual artists, all with varying levels of success.
Investors have been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into industry-specific generative AI tools out of the belief that these have the potential to solve problems that, say, hospitals and marketing departments may encounter.
Sam Altman, the CEO of the firm behind ChatGPT, would agree, as he previously said that "generative text is something we all need to adapt to."
"We adapted to calculators and changed what we tested for in math class, I imagine," Altman said during an interview with StrictlyVC in January. "This is a more extreme version of that, no doubt, but also the benefits of it are more extreme, as well."
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who has researched the impact of AI on the workforce, echoes the sentiment.
"It's absolutely true that AI applications like ChatGPT can very much improve workers' lives," Muro told Insider.
Workers should be careful when using AI tools, as the tech can be prone to misinformation, and it can remove the human touch from tasks like writing. Most companies also haven't established formal rules around employee use of the AI tool, though firms like Microsoft – a major partner and investor of ChatGPT's parent Open AI – have recently given employees the green light to use the chatbot for work purposes, as long as they don't share sensitive information with the site.
Here's how you can use ChatGPT and AI to help make your work life easier.