An IT director used ChatGPT for research after phone calls and Google didn't help, and said it 'completely blew my mind'

• An IT director used ChatGPT to research vaping detectors and told the WSJ it "completely blew my mind."
• He'd already spent hours calling people and looking on Google for solutions, without much luck.

An IT director who used the AI chatbot ChatGPT for research said it "completely blew my mind."

Telmo Gomes, the co-founder and IT director of LiveSense, an Australian tech company that monitors temperature and other conditions in offices, labs, and hotels, told The Wall Street Journal that he had spent hours calling people and looking on Google to find which sensors could detect vaping.

Companies which already had solutions didn't want to share their trade secrets with him, so he turned to ChatGPT instead, he told The Journal.

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He said ChatGPT gave him several answers, including some solutions he'd found during his research, as well as a warning to consider the ethics of behavior monitoring.

"It completely blew my mind," Gomes told The Journal. "We're a small company. It will let us do more with less."

In the space of just a few months, use of generative AI has boomed and it's already having real-life impacts on the workplace. ChatGPT, owned by OpenAI, creates text responses to user-submitted prompts based on huge amounts of data.

Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of online course company Coursera, told The Journal that he started using ChatGPT to draft company letters and notes and asked his assistant to draft email replies using it, too. Maggioncalda edits the responses before sending them.

"I spend way more time thinking and way less time writing," he told The Journal. "I don't want to be the one who doesn't use it, because someone who is using it is going to have a lot of advantages."

Maggioncalda previously told Insider that he uses ChatGPT daily as a "writing assistant" and "blog partner." The chatbot is a "game changer," he added.

Generative AI platforms have been used to write news articles, homework, college essays, job applications, and even novels. Advocates say the services can help workers save time on manual tasks and assist people with dyslexia. But critics have expressed concerns about the ethics of AI, including worries that it could plagiarize material, develop bias, and even argue with users.

Some schools and colleges are banning students from using ChatGPT or are otherwise changing the nature of their assignments to reflect the surge in use of the technology. Companies are creating policies around their use of AI-generated content, including when it should and shouldn't be used, and there is a growing push for text written by AI to be clearly labelled as so.