ChatGPT significantly increases productivity in the office: MIT scientists prove significantly faster texting and also higher quality

The artificial intelligence (AI)-based software ChatGPT from OpenAI (https://openai.com) increases the productivity of office workers by 40 per cent – especially when creating reply letters, emails, offers and other texts. But the quality of the texts also increases. Independent evaluators register an 18 per cent improvement here, as a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (https://www.mit.edu) (MIT) shows.

“A useful technology

“We can say with certainty is that generative AI will have a big impact on office work,” says Shakked Noy, a PhD student in economics who co-authored the study with fellow student Whitney Zhang. “It’s a useful technology. But it’s too early to tell if it will be good or bad, or how exactly it will make society adapt.”

For centuries, people have feared that technological advances would lead to job losses. But new technologies also create new jobs, and if they increase worker productivity, they can have a net positive impact on the economy, they say. “Productivity is at the forefront of economists’ minds when they think about new technological developments,” Noy says.

453 subjects studied

To study the impact of generative AI on productivity, the researchers gave 453 people with university degrees, grant applicants, consultants, data analysts, human resources professionals and managers two writing tasks specific to their professions. The 20- to 30-minute tasks included writing cover letters for grant applications, emails about organisational restructuring and plans for analytics to help a company decide which customers to send push notifications to based on given customer data.

Experienced professionals in the same professions as the participants evaluated each submission as if they were encountering it in a work environment. The raters did not know which submissions had been created using ChatGPT and which had been created by humans. Half of the participants were given access to the OpenAI chatbot GPT-3.5 for the second task, and these users completed their tasks an average of 11 minutes faster than the control group, while their average quality scores increased by 18 per cent. There is also a decrease in performance inequality between workers, meaning that those who received a lower score for self-generated texts benefited more from using ChatGPT than their higher-performing colleagues.