College-educated professionals performing mid-level professional writing tasks experience substantial increases in productivity when given access to ChatGPT. The generative writing tool increases the output quality of low-ability workers while reducing their time spent, and it allows high-ability workers to maintain their quality standards while becoming significantly faster.

Das Paper beschreibt, dass ChatGPT die Produktivität bei Schreibarbeiten erhöht, wobei bei schlechteren Schreibenden sowohl die Qualität steigt als auch die benötigte Zeit sinkt, während bei guten Schreibenden die Qualität weitgehend gleich bleibt, ihr Zeitbedarf aber deutlich sinkt.

We examine the productivity effects of a generative artificial intelligence technology—the assistive chatbot ChatGPT—in the context of mid-level professional writing tasks. In a preregistered online experiment, we assign occupation-specific, incentivized writing tasks to 444 college-educated professionals, and randomly expose half of them to ChatGPT. Our results show that ChatGPT substantially raises average productivity: time taken decreases by 0.8 SDs and output quality rises by 0.4 SDs. Inequality between workers decreases, as ChatGPT compresses the productivity distribution by benefiting low-ability workers more. ChatGPT mostly substitutes for worker effort rather than complementing worker skills, and restructures tasks towards idea-generation and editing and away from rough-drafting. Exposure to ChatGPT increases job satisfaction and self-efficacy and heightens both concern and excitement about automation technologies.