Artificial intelligence presents new possibilities on the way of working and leaves many observers stressed about What will become of white collar jobs?
Ethan Mollick, professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has closely followed developments in generative AI tools, which can create essays, images, voices, code and more. based on a user’s text prompts.
He recently decided to see what such tools could accomplish in just 30 minutes, and describes the results this weekend on his One Useful Thing blog. The results were, he writes, “superhuman.”
In that short time, he writes, the tools managed to do market research, create a positioning document, write an email campaign, create a website, create a logo and a “hero photo” graphic, to do a social media campaign for multiple platforms. , then create a script and create a video.
The project involved marketing the launch of a new educational game, and he wanted AI tools to do all the work, while he was just giving instructions. He chose a game of which he himself is the author in order to measure the quality of the work. The game, Saturn Parable from Wharton Interactive, is designed to teach leadership and team skills during a fictional mission to Saturn.
First, Mollick turned to the GPT-4 powered version of Bing. Bing, of course, is Microsoft’s search engine, far behind Google, while GPT-4 is the successor to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI chatbot that took the world by storm after its release in late November. Microsoft To invested billions in OpenAI.
Mollick asked Bing to learn about gaming and the business simulation market it is a part of. He then asked her to “pretend to be a marketing genius” and produce a document that “presents an email marketing campaign and a single web page to promote the game”.
In less than 3 minutes, it generated four emails totaling 1,757 words.
He then asked Bing to describe the web page, including text and graphics, and then used GPT-4 to build the site.
He asked MidJourney, a generative AI tool that produces images from text prompts, to produce the “hero image” (the big image that visitors first encounter when visiting a website) .
Next, he asked Bing to launch the campaign on social media, and it produced posts for five platforms, including Facebook And Twitter.
Then he asked Bing to write a script for a video, an AI tool called ElevenLabs to create a realistic voice, and another called D-id to turn it into a video.
At that point, Mollick ran out of time. But, he notes, if he had had the plugins that OpenAI announced this weekhis AI chatbot, connected to email automation software, could have handled the email campaign for him.
According to OpenAI, plugins for Slack, Expedia, and Instacart are among the first to be created, with many more to come. The problem with AI chatbots, the company notes, is that “the only information they can learn from is their training data.” Plugins can be their “eyes and ears”, giving them access to more recent or specific data.
Mollick writes that he would have needed a team and “maybe days of work” to do all the work the AI tools did in 30 minutes.
Bill Gates wrote on his blog this week that ChatGPT and similar tools “will be more and more like having a white collar available to help you with various tasks”.
True white collar workers could be forgiven for feeling some anxiety.
