A Wharton professor says AI is like an 'intern' who 'lies a little bit' to make their bosses happy

• UPenn professor Ethan Mollick compares AI to an "intern" who "lies a little bit," CBS reports.
• Like interns, AI tools require guidance for their outputs to be useful, according to Mollick.

AI can be more than just your assistant — it can also be an employer's intern, says one professor.

Ethan Mollick, a professor at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, said that AI tools can be "good for a lot of things" despite its tendency to make factual errors. But that's not so different from humans, especially those who are new to the job market, he said.

"It's almost best to think about it as a person — like an intern — you have working for you," Mollick told CBS News in an interview this week when asked about AI's usefulness and limitations.

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Similar to interns who may overcompensate to get ahead of the curve, Mollick compares AI to an "infinite intern" who "lies a little bit" and, at times, wants to make their bosses "a little happy."

Writing emails, Mollick says, is one way AI can be used to "help you overcome blockages in your every day life" and become "a better and more productive writer."

But like interns, AI requires guidance for its outputs to be useful.

"It's actually very useful across a wide variety of tasks, but not on its own," Mollick says. "You need to help it out."

When Insider reached out for comment, Mollick referred to his previous blog post that echoes the sentiment.

"I would never expect to send out an intern's work without checking it over, or at least without having worked with the other person enough to understand that their work did not need checking," Mollick wrote in his blog post. "In the same way, an AI may not be error free, but can save you lots of work by providing a first pass at an annoying task."

Mollick's thoughts on AI come as generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT take the world by storm. As of January, more than 100 million users have flocked to the chatbot, some using it as a personal assistant to make their work and lives easier.

In fact, Mollick, who teaches a class on entrepreneurship and innovation, requires his students to use ChatGPT to help with their classwork. Still, he recognizes that the chatbot isn't perfect.

"AI will never be as good as the best experts in a field,"Mollick told NPR in an interview. "We still need to teach people to be experts."