When ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, a number of debates emerged, many of which revolved around an age-old question: Which is better, human or machine?
Given the predicted importance that these tools will have in future professional practice, the real question is actually more nuanced: do humans do a better job on their own, or when they rely on artificial intelligence (AI)? More precisely: are they able to make good use of AI – to assess it correctly and correct its responses where necessary – to improve their performance?
A recent study suggests that this question is not as clear-cut as one might think. It concerns an assignment given in a class at HEC Paris (France’s most prestigious business school), in which each student was randomly assigned two case studies.
While the first exercise is representative of “traditional” work practices, the second may end up corresponding more closely to many jobs in the future. Indeed, if AI tools become as ubiquitous as many predict, the human role will be to evaluate and correct the results produced by AI.
For the first case, students had to write an answer to the assigned question from scratch. For the second, they received a ready-made answer, which they had to evaluate and, if necessary, correct. They were told that each answer could have been provided by ChatGPT, which was indeed the case for most of them.
