The release of OpenAI’s new chatbot has enormous implications for a wide variety of endeavors in the workplace, Associate Professor Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School wrote in the Harvard Business Review.

The chatbot, ChatGPT, “interacts in a conversational way,” the company claims. “The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

“While versions of GPT have been around for a while, this model has crossed a threshold,” Mollick wrote. “It’s genuinely useful for a wide range of tasks, from creating software to generating business ideas to writing a wedding toast.” Such a model would provide an advantage to any business that understands the significance of this change from previous chatbots.

ChatGPT, he wrote, has made an important transition. It “opens a new world of applications” because it can be applied to "creative and expressive tasks (writing marketing copy) rather than dangerous and repetitive ones (driving a forklift)."

What this means is that an artificial intelligence (AI) can “produce paragraphs of solidly written English (…or whatever language you choose) with a high degree of sophistication, [and] it can also create blocks of computer code on command.” He cited an example of how he introduced it to one of his students, who then used it to complete a four-hour project in less than an hour.

Using AI to generate high quality, accurate writing “can greatly increase the productivity of businesses in a variety of industries,” he wrote—or, in this case, as pointed out, had an AI write—including marketing and advertising, consulting, finance, journalism and publishing. He also used AI to write his course syllabus, class assignments, grading criteria, and lecture notes.

The latter needed editing, which brought Mollick to consider another possibility with AI:  that of human-machine hybrid work. “[H]umans can now guide AIs and correct mistakes,” he wrote.

ChatGPT is also being used “do basic consulting reports, write lectures, produce code that generates novel art, generate ideas, and much more,” but it still has limitations. “It is no replacement for Google,” he wrote. Using a barnyard epithet for nonsense, he wrote that ChatGPT “literally does not know what it doesn’t know, because it is, in fact, not an entity at all, but rather a complex algorithm generating meaningful sentences.”

“It also can’t explain what it does or how it does it, making the results of AI inexplicable,” he wrote. “That means that systems can have biases and that unethical action is possible, hard to detect, and hard to stop.”

But the advantages of AI to the “creative, analytical, and writing-based work that AI is now capable of” are apparent now, he wrote, calling this world-changing.

“Machines can now do tasks that could only be done by highly trained humans,” he wrote, concluding that “[i]ntegrating AI into our work—and our lives—will bring sweeping changes.”