Here's how 10 industries are experimenting with ChatGPT

🗺️ Travel itineraries: Travel Weekly, an industry magazine, tested the AI to see how its travel recommendations compare with those produced by an advisor with years of experience. ChatGPT provided solid answers to questions like, “What is the best luxury hotel in Paris?” but lacked the nuance that comes from the personal connection that an advisor has with their client.

⚖️ Court decisions: A judge in Colombia has used ChatGPT to make a court ruling. It’s the first instance in which a court has admitted to using an AI in deciding a case. Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia used the AI tool to answer legal questions about the case, and included ChatGPT’s responses in his decision.

📄 Standard legal documents: A New Zealand estate lawyer asked ChatGPT to write his will. James Peacock explained how the AI walked him through the process, making suggestions along the way. In the end, it wouldn’t write a “real” will for him, but he could get around that by asking it to write a hypothetical will, which it did perfectly well.

🏠 Listing descriptions: By typing keywords into ChatGPT, real estate agents are whipping up property summaries. Just a few tweaks from a human, and the description is ready to go out.

📃 Writing scripts: Wistia, a company specializing in video marketing, is experimenting with creating AI videos from start to finish. ChatGPT’s role? It wrote the script for the promotional video. After asking it for a 60-second YouTube-style text about making apple pie, one of the marketers concluded that it was “an incredible starting point for a video script.”

🤔 Critical thinking assignments: If you can’t beat it, embrace it. That’s the approach Ethan Mollick is taking as he integrates ChatGPT into his classes at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. To demonstrate mastery of a topic, Mollick asks his students to teach the AI about it and suggest improvements.

✔️ Lesson plans and materials: Educators are constantly creating new teaching materials, like essay prompts, quiz questions, and lesson outlines. Some, like Stephen Lockyer, are thinking about handing that work off to ChatGPT. The primary school teacher asked the bot to create a multi-lesson plan on the topic of volcanoes. “I hate to be that guy,” he tweeted afterwards, “but AI is going to be transformative as a teacher.”

🗳️ Crafting legislation: Earlier this month, ChatGPT wrote a bill to regulate generative artificial intelligence that was filed in Massachusetts. Ok, it had a little help, but State Senator Barry Finegold said the AI wrote more than half the bill.

🩺 A diagnostic aid: Physicians and academics have begun experimenting with ChatGPT’s ability to diagnose patients. One doctor, Jeremy Faust, called the AI’s reponse “eerily good.” But he also noted that not all the information it provided was accurate. In fact, some of it was entirely “made up” by the bot—which means, given how high the stakes are in medicine, it will be a long time before doctors rely entirely on AI to diagnose patients for them.

✍️ Writing articles: A host of news organizations (although not Quartz!) have already experimented with asking ChatGPT to write articles. But these experiments are mostly attempts at finding a quirky angle into the ChatGPT narrative. Officially, the AI’s training data only includes information up to 2021, rendering it currently incapable of writing about current events.

⌨️ Writing code: Programmers are experimenting with ChatGPT’s ability to write good code quickly. One developer was able to build an entire app using the AI, though the output required some human intervention. Cybercriminals are also trying their hand at using ChatGPT, some creating effective malware without any prior experience.

🪲 Debugging code: ChatGPT doesn’t just write usable code snippets, it can also discover the errors in code that doesn’t work. Finding these errors can be both difficult and time-consuming for developers, which is likely why Udemy is already offering a short course on using ChatGPT to “code and debug 10X better, faster, stronger.”

🗓️ Project management: ChatGPT is able to generate schedules that fit the scope of simple construction projects. Academics from New York University-Abu Dhabi provided the AI with a floor plan, a list of tasks, and a statement of scope. They discovered that, while not perfect, ChatGPT was able to assist with basic project management.