From marketers to coders, professionals are turning to ChatGPT, survey shows

AI is being used to write emails and generate ideas but won't necessarily improve a worker's own skills

The OpenAI website on a laptop computer. Its artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT has gone viral. Bloomberg

ChatGTP and other artificial intelligence tools are being used by about a third of professionals to help them with their jobs, a survey has revealed.

Created by San Francisco-based OpenAI, which was co-founded by Elon Musk, ChatGPT is a program that comes up with human-like responses to prompts in seconds, based on information publicly available on the internet.

The program has become hugely popular since its launch in December, while also raising concerns about what it is being used for and its accuracy.

For some professionals, it has provided a new dimension to their job and has proven to be a valuable assistant.

A total of 27 per cent of surveyed professionals have already used generative AI to assist with work-related tasks.

About 4,500 professionals from companies such as Amazon, Bank of America, Edelman, Google, IBM, JP Morgan, McKinsey, Meta, Nike, Twitter and thousands of others took part in the survey conducted by Fishbowl, a social platform owned by employer review site Glassdoor.

Generation Z professionals have the highest rate of adoption, with 29 per cent having used it at work, followed by Generation X with 28 per cent and Millennials with 27 per cent.

The survey also found that 20 per cent of women and 30 per cent of men had used AI to help them.

Marketing and advertising professionals have the highest adoption of AI, with 37 per cent saying they use it, while 35 per cent of workers in technology and 30 per cent in consulting gave a positive response.

Health care had the lowest adoption at 15 per cent.

The AI is being used to write emails, perform copy writing, generate ideas, write and troubleshoot bits of code, and summarise research or meeting notes.

“Anybody who doesn’t use this will shortly be at a severe disadvantage. Like, shortly. Like, very soon,” Jeff Maggioncalda, chief executive of online learning platform Coursera, told CNN.

“I’m just thinking about my cognitive ability with this tool. Versus before, it’s a lot higher and my efficiency and productivity are way higher."

Users of ChatGPT posting on Fishbowl described it as "mind-blowing", and told of how it was helping them as content creators.

"We have many reports and deliverables to get out the door and you can ask ChatGPT to help make your points clearer, more readable, concise, etc," one poster wrote, but with the caveat that it doesn't help to build up a worker's own skills.

Schools in New York have already moved to ban ChatGPT amid plagiarism concerns.

OpenAI officials say they are working on ways to identify text generated by the bot.

Microsoft is in talks with OpenAI about investing as much as $10 billion. The software company is also looking to integrate GPT, the language model that underlies ChatGPT, into its widely-used Teams and Office software.

Open AI received $1 billion in funding from Microsoft in 2019.

OpenAI is in talks to sell shares in a tender offering valuing it at about $29 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.