Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life, powering everything from voice assistants and personalized recommendations to self-driving cars and medical diagnoses.

AI is changing the way people do their work every single day. For example, I didn’t write this article’s lead sentence; I had ChatGPT write it for me.

The AI chatbot ChatGPT has taken over the internet since its launch in Nov. 2022, reaching 100 million monthly users in two months. For reference, TikTok reached that milestone in nine months, and so did Instagram after two-and-a-half years.

Information Systems Professor Yazan Alnsour and Instructional Designers John Bellotti and Sarah Bradway spoke about this in their virtual talk titled “ChatGPT: Friend or Foe?” earlier this week.

During the talk, Bradway created a poll asking the 53 attendees whether or not they used AI in the past week. Sixty-five percent said they had.

Alnsour said that AI creeps into our everyday lives in ways that we don’t think about.

“If you open your email and you see some spam filter, that’s a type of AI,” he said. “There are so many examples around us and many of us don’t realize.”

Phone or computer face recognition, credit card fraud prevention, personalized shopping online and recommendations on streaming services like Netflix all employ AI, Alnsour said.

But artificial intelligences like ChatGPT have also affected the workplace. The World Economic Forum’s 2020 Future of Jobs report estimated that, by 2025, 85 million jobs may be uprooted by machines, whose abilities are being vastly improved by complex AI algorithms.

Bradway said that the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence is improving efficiency. During the talk, she used the example of the 1940 U.S. census, which included 134 million records and took six months to manually parse.

Using AI to transcribe handwriting for the 1950 census, she said that the parsing of 151 million records took only nine days.

But recently, ChatGPT has taken the AI spotlight, especially regarding academic integrity. Using a vast collection of internet data, ChatGPT can provide relevant answers to prompt questions, remember previous prompts and tailor new responses in written long-form essays and descriptions.

The event speakers pointed to various examples of ChatGPT’s use, including finding quick summaries about a topic, proofreading, sorting through datasets and converting programming code from one language to another.

Bradway said that she used ChatGPT to write content for a website she’s remodeling.

“A lot of times I would ask ChatGPT to rewrite paragraphs and, though it’s using my points, it would refine the language and sentence structure to make it more coherent,” she said.

Bellotti said that, for a class he’s enrolled in, ChatGPT can help avoid writer’s block and provide individuals with a jumping off point to flesh out their ideas. Using it as a second pair of eyes, he said, condensed his three-page paper into a page and a half.

Since its release, there has been buzz surrounding plagiarism and academic integrity. Since ChatGPT generates human-sounding writing, the service can be exploited to write students’ assignments.

Though there are clear ethical problems with this, Bellotti said that ChatGPT can be ethically used to troubleshoot coding issues and improve already-written essays.

He talked about a professor’s assignment that instructed students to write a blog and then grade a version of the blog written by ChatGPT. He said that having the students grade ChatGPT’s blog can help them better structure their own.

“It can give you ideas,” he said. “I think this could be a great tool to unlock the greatness in those who may not be as good at writing but have fantastic ideas they just can’t get on paper. Of course, it will be helpful for the general population, too, as there is no limit to where this has the potential to go.”