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Wharton professor uses AI to do business project in 30 minutes that would take team days
Last edited Mon Mar 27, 2023, 12:11 AM - Edit history (2)
This is both an "isn't AI amazing" story and a "look at all the job losses coming" story.
From Fortune - https://fortune.com/2023/03/26/wharton-professor-ai-tools-openai-chatgpt-30-minutes-business-project-superhuman-results/ - via Yahoo News:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wharton-professor-gave-tools-30-224951777.html
A Wharton professor gave A.I. tools 30 minutes to work on a business project. The results were ‘superhuman’
Steve Mollman
Sun, March 26, 2023 at 5:49 PM CDT
Artificial intelligence is presenting new possibilities on how to do work, and leaving many observers nervous about what will become of white-collar jobs.
Ethan Mollick, a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been closely following developments in generative A.I. tools, which can create essays, images, voices, code, and much else based on a user’s text prompts.
He recently decided to see how much such tools could accomplish in only 30 minutes, and described the results this weekend on his blog One Useful Thing. The results were, he writes, “superhuman.”
In that short amount of 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 “hero shot” graphic, make a social media campaign for multiple platforms, and script and create a video.
-snip-
Steve Mollman
Sun, March 26, 2023 at 5:49 PM CDT
Artificial intelligence is presenting new possibilities on how to do work, and leaving many observers nervous about what will become of white-collar jobs.
Ethan Mollick, a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been closely following developments in generative A.I. tools, which can create essays, images, voices, code, and much else based on a user’s text prompts.
He recently decided to see how much such tools could accomplish in only 30 minutes, and described the results this weekend on his blog One Useful Thing. The results were, he writes, “superhuman.”
In that short amount of 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 “hero shot” graphic, make a social media campaign for multiple platforms, and script and create a video.
-snip-
His blog post is here: https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-in-30-minutes
Here are three ways of looking at what I did in 30 minutes:
This would have been a lot of work for me to do. Many hours, maybe days of work. I would have needed a team to help: I have never done an email marketing campaign, don’t know CSS, and certainly could not have staged a photo like the one in the hero image. I am sure humans could have done better, but they could not have been as fast. And that, I think, is both the problem and the opportunity. When we all can do superhuman amounts of work, what happens? Do we do less work an have more leisure? Do we work more and do the jobs of ten people? Do employers benefit? Employees? I am not sure. Historically, these sorts of disruptions lead to short-term issues, and long-term employment growth. Hopefully, we will be in a future where we do less boring work, offloading the annoying and unfulfilling tasks, so that we can focus on the more creative and generative work we like to do.
The key is that I was able to do this using the tools available today, without any specific technical knowledge, and in plain English prompts: I just asked for what I wanted, and the AI provided it. That means almost everyone else can do it, too. We are already in a world of superhumans, we just have to wait for the implications.
-snipping sections on specific output and input-
Content: I “created” a market positioning document, an email campaign, a website, a logo, a hero image, a script and animated video, social campaigns for 5 platforms, and some other odds-and-ends besides.
Content: I “created” a market positioning document, an email campaign, a website, a logo, a hero image, a script and animated video, social campaigns for 5 platforms, and some other odds-and-ends besides.
This would have been a lot of work for me to do. Many hours, maybe days of work. I would have needed a team to help: I have never done an email marketing campaign, don’t know CSS, and certainly could not have staged a photo like the one in the hero image. I am sure humans could have done better, but they could not have been as fast. And that, I think, is both the problem and the opportunity. When we all can do superhuman amounts of work, what happens? Do we do less work an have more leisure? Do we work more and do the jobs of ten people? Do employers benefit? Employees? I am not sure. Historically, these sorts of disruptions lead to short-term issues, and long-term employment growth. Hopefully, we will be in a future where we do less boring work, offloading the annoying and unfulfilling tasks, so that we can focus on the more creative and generative work we like to do.
The key is that I was able to do this using the tools available today, without any specific technical knowledge, and in plain English prompts: I just asked for what I wanted, and the AI provided it. That means almost everyone else can do it, too. We are already in a world of superhumans, we just have to wait for the implications.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read this:
When we all can do superhuman amounts of work, what happens? Do we do less work an have more leisure? Do we work more and do the jobs of ten people? Do employers benefit? Employees?
In a potentially utopian society, it might be hard to guess what happens.
In reality, without regulations to stop employers from exploiting AI to lay off workers, it's pretty obvious what will happen. It's already happening. See https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217681540 .
And teachers' jobs aren't safe, either. See https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217746844 .
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman never finished college, but launched his first startup at 19. He does think we'll need a universal basic income in the future, as the jobs disappear, but doesn't think it will need to be very much, because power will be free thanks to fusion, so food will be cheap, and you'll be able to get all the education you need from your smartphone. See https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217685127#post9 .
In that future, jobs as professors will be scarce.
As for what jobs aren't threatened by AI, OpenAI's own study explained:
Agricultural Equipment Operators
Athletes and Sports Competitors
Auto Mechanics
Cement Masons
Cooks
Cafeteria Attendants
Bartenders
Dishwashers
Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers
Carpenters
Painters
Plumbers
Meat, Poultry, and Fish Cutters and Trimmers
Slaughterers and Meat Packers
Stonemasons
But give them a bit more time to improve robots...
EDITING to add that Professor Mollick has more to say about AI causing disruptions on his Twitter feed at https://twitter.com/emollick . See reply 9 below for some tweets.
EDITING AGAIN to link to a thread I posted two days ago about an NPR story on another experiment he did, that one on deepfakes, and his warning about those: https://democraticunderground.com/100217756831 .
25 replies
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I've seen people use these systems more or less this way. They spend most of their time proofreading and editing. The mistakes are tolerable because time is saved overall.
It is scary for some career paths. It's not just marketing people that are in trouble. It's also not great for software developers. You can ask GPT to write a program in pretty much any language. I've heard that the results for relatively small requests are good quality and fast.
Based on that list, I think I'll try out for the NBA. 
