ChatGPT increases writing productivity, finds study

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google Bard have been all the rage in recent months, with businesses across the world using the technology to perform tasks like coding and content creation. Now a new study published on Friday by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), showed that ChatGPT has increased productivity for workers who were assigned tasks like writing cover letters, basic emails, and cost-benefit analyses.

“ChatGPT decreased the time it took workers to complete certain writing tasks by 40% and increased output quality by 18%,” a statement issued by the institution said on 14 July.

“What we can say for sure is generative AI is going to have a big effect on white collar work,” said Shakked Noy, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Economics, who co-authored the paper with fellow PhD student Whitney Zhang.

“I think what our study shows is that this kind of technology has important applications in white collar work. It’s a useful technology. But it’s still too early to tell if it will be good or bad, or how exactly it’s going to cause society to adjust,” he said.

Noy added that this relatively new technology can increase worker productivity and have a net positive effect on the economy. 

The study saw nearly 450 college-educated marketers, grant writers, consultants, data analysts, human resource professionals, and managers given two writing tasks specific to their occupation. Then experienced professionals in the same occupations evaluated each submission without knowing which submissions were created with the help of ChatGPT and found that participants using ChatGPT finished their tasks 11 minutes faster than the control group, while their average quality evaluations increased by 18%.

The research also unveiled another interesting fact that workers exposed to ChatGPT during the experiment were twice as likely to report using it in their real job two weeks after the experiment.

“The experiment demonstrates that it does bring significant speed benefits, even if those speed benefits are lesser in the real world because you need to spend time fact-checking and writing the prompts,” Noy said.

The researchers also hope to extrapolate from ChatGPT’s impact an understanding of generative AI’s effect on the economy, as Zhang said, “There are so many other factors that are going to affect wages, employment, and shifts across sectors that would require pieces of evidence that aren’t in our paper”.

To be sure, another research published in April by the National Bureau of Economic Research, titled Generative AI at Work, found that worker productivity has seen a 14% boost in companies utilising generative AI platforms.

The study further noted that generative AI replicated that work of the firm's top performers, which means that the biggest productivity improvements came from the novice and low-skilled workers.

A similar report published in June by the World Economic Forum (WEF) also found that that low-skilled workers in particular benefitted from the tool, which helped reduce the time they took — and shrunk the difference in quality between their work and more skilled workers.

As there can be risks associated with such outcomes, researchers believe that care should be taken to mitigate AI bias based on training data and ethical guidelines must be developed to ensure that technical progress is balanced with responsible use.

Likewise, MIT researchers agree that, even if it’s accepted that ChatGPT will increase many workers’ productivity, much work remains to be done to figure out how society should respond to generative AI’s proliferation.

“The policy needed to adjust to these technologies can be very different depending on what future research finds,” Zhang said. “If we think this will boost wages for lower-paid workers, that’s a very different implication than if it’s going to increase wage inequality by boosting the wages of already high earners. I think there’s a lot of downstream economic and political effects that are important to pin down,” he added.