Most people don’t think GenAI has improved their productivity

Damning new study from Upwork

Wow! Incredibly damning new study on GenAI from the Upwork Research Institute, via Baldur Bjarnason (whose wonderful essay on LLMs and how they fool the gullible I discussed in April).

Bjarnason‘s new essay, The other shoe dropping on ‘AI’ and office work, reports that Upwork found that

“Nearly half (47%) of workers using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect. Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way.”

Says Bjarnason, “It’s quite unusual for a study like this on a new office tool, roughly two years after that tool—ChatGPT—exploded into people’s workplaces, to return such a resoundingly negative sentiment.”

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Many coders and tech aficionados may love ChatGPT for work, but much of the outside world feels quite differently.

As Bjarnason points out, “it fits with the studies on the actual functionality of said tool: the incredibly common and hard to fix errors, the biases, the general low quality of the output, and the often stated expectation from management that it’s a magic fix for the organisational catastrophe that is the mass layoff fad.”

Read Bjarnason’s new essay here.

PS Microsoft Bing completely flubbed, 4/4, “people going yuck towards Generative AI”. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.