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Employees at investment giant BlackRock had no idea that the strategy memos they were reading were actually written by ChatGPT, the company’s COO announced Thursday.
Robert Goldstein, BlackRock’s chief operating officer, told this anecdote in an interview. Fortune’s Lee Clifford. The two were speaking at the outlet’s Future of Finance conference in New York on May 16.
Goldstein said he worked with his team to write a memo on the company’s generative AI strategy for a board meeting “several months ago.” But instead of drafting it themselves, Goldstein decided that he should have his team write a memo to ChatGPT.
“So we took our strategy document and entered it into ChatGPT with a very simple prompt: ‘Write an executive summary,'” says Goldstein. “So I was given a memo, and I gave that memo to a bunch of people in the company to read it.”
However, no one could tell that the note was created by an AI. Instead, Goldstein said most of the feedback he received focused on the memo’s tone.
“Comments were usually things like, ‘I don’t like your tone.’ Comments were things like, ‘You sound like you’re selling yourself short,'” Goldstein said. “No one realized it was actually written by a computer.”
“When I told some people that this was written on a computer, they said, “I don’t like the sound of computers.” And I thought, “Well, we should solve this with a computer.” ” he continued.
While the jury is still out on whether AI will be a boon or bane for the job market, BlackRock is pretty bullish on its promise and how it could improve its company’s fortunes.
BlackRock representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI outside of normal business hours.
Last month, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said: financial statement The company’s investments in AI are believed to improve productivity.
“This also means higher wages,” Fink told investors. “As a percentage of the organization as a whole, we’re doing more with fewer people, and that’s really our goal.”
But not everyone is convinced by the benefits of AI.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned on Monday that AI could hit the job market “like a tsunami.”
Speaking at the Swiss Institute of International Affairs in Zurich, the IMF chief outlined the uncertainties that the AI revolution may bring.
“We have very little time to prepare people and prepare businesses,” Georgieva said. “If managed well, it has the potential to significantly increase productivity, but it also has the potential to increase misinformation and, of course, further social inequality.”