7 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work

A burst of experimentation followed ChatGPT's release to the public in late 2022. Now many people are integrating the newest models and custom systems into what they do all day: their work.

Chefs are using A.I. to invent recipes; doctors are using it to read M.R.I. and CT scans; scientists are unlocking discoveries. It’s helping workers with their day-to-day tasks: writing code, summarizing emails, creating ideas, generating curricula — even as it still makes plenty of mistakes.

Recent surveys have found that almost one in five U.S. workers say they use it at least semi-regularly for work. Twenty-one people told us how.

People are using A.I. to …

Select wines for restaurant menus

Sam McNulty

Restaurant owner and operator

Mr. McNulty, who owns restaurants, brewpubs and dance clubs in Cleveland, uses ChatGPT to analyze sales reports and brainstorm how to grow sales. He’s also used it to help pick wines. He sent a “voluminous” wine portfolio from a distributor to the chatbot and gave it some instructions — specific pricing and particular regions among them — and got back a list, including:

Herdade do Esporão Monte Velho Branco

Region: Vinho Regional Alentejano, Portugal

Grapes: Antão Vaz, Roupeiro & Perrum

Wholesale Est.: $7-9 per 750 ml

Why It’s Great: A crowd‐pleasing white that combines citrus, stone fruit and saline notes with bright acidity — an ideal food‐friendly pour for small plates or seafood.

“The results were astonishingly good and saved me and my team countless hours of meetings with wine reps, tastings and debate,” he said. “The only part of the wine-program building process I missed was the tastings ... so far the A.I. can't recreate the joy of taking that sip.”

Digitize a herbarium

Jordan Teisher

Curator and director

There are eight million dried plant specimens at the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium in St. Louis. Now A.I. is helping identify them.

Experienced taxonomists can quickly recognize most specimens, said Mr. Teisher, but that requires years of training.

So the garden is building an A.I. model using spectral data — the pattern of light reflected by the plant. Leaves from many different kinds of plants are scanned, labeled and put into the model as training data. Then new plants can go through the same process, and the model will identify them. If the model is quite certain that the spectral data look the same as they do for other plants, it’ll say so. If not, the plant can go to an expert.

Leaves are placed on a black plate to measure their “reflectance spectra,” part of building an A.I. model that can identify new specimens.

Nathan Kwarta, Missouri Botanical Garden

“We can cut down on the time expert taxonomists are spending on common species,” Mr. Teisher said. “Rather than them getting five boxes of plants that come in, they can get a small box that says, ‘Here are the ones the model isn’t sure about.’”

Those could be species so rare or infrequently seen in the herbarium that the model simply couldn’t match it, or a new species entirely.

And this kind of project is only possible, the garden staff said, because of advances in cheap computing power. The GPUs necessary to train A.I. models quickly are easier to get than before. And the garden has enough funding to process several hundred thousand specimens. Identified specimens can be used for a variety of research, including on biodiversity and climate change.

“We want these data to be compatible with other institutions, so we’re collaborating closely,” Mr. Teisher said. “We have the money to do a big chunk of our herbarium, but ultimately we want this to be a tool usable by everyone.”

Make everything look better

Dan Frazier

Designer and small business owner

Mr. Frazier designs and sells things like bumper stickers and magnetic signs. To help with the graphic design, he uses Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill, a two-year-old A.I. feature that adjusts images automatically.

“If I take a picture of a product, and don't like the glare or reflection I see on some shiny surface, I can use generative fill to ‘imagine’ that part of the photo, and usually one of the resulting images will be acceptable to me,” he said. “Or if I want to use a head shot of a politician on a bumper sticker, and I want to show a little more of the coat or shirt than appeared in the photo I am using, I can use generative fill to imagine that additional clothing.”

A problem that might have taken 20 minutes to address now takes 20 seconds, he estimated.

In one recent case, he wanted to post an image of a bike helmet he’d built himself, but he didn’t think he was the best model for it. So he used Photoshop’s A.I. to generate a woman’s face.

Dan Frazier

But A.I. can only fill in the gaps for Mr. Frazier. “I have found generative fill to be less useful at creating images from scratch,” he said. “I once wanted to create an image of Joe Biden looking like one of the founding fathers, maybe like George Washington. But I was not happy with any of the results I was getting. I ended up melding a photo of Biden with a lifelike painting of Washington using traditional Photoshop techniques.”

Create lesson plans that meet educational standards

Manuel Soto

E.S.L. teacher

Mr. Soto, an E.S.L. teacher in Puerto Rico, said the administrative part of his job can be time consuming: writing lesson plans, following curriculum sent forth by the Puerto Rico Department of Education, making sure it all aligns with standards and expectations. Prompts like this to ChatGPT help cut his prep time in half:

Create a 5 day lesson plan based on unit 9.1 based off Puerto Rico Core standards. Include lesson objectives, standards and expectations for each day. I need an opening, development with differentiated instruction, closing and exit ticket.

After integrating the A.I. results, his detailed lesson plans for the week looked like this:

English as a Second Language sample lesson plan.

Manuel Soto

But he’s noticing more students using A.I. and not relying “on their inner voice.”

Instead of fighting it, he’s planning to incorporate A.I. into his curriculum next year. “So they realize it can be used practically with fundamental reading and writing skills they should possess,” he said.

Make a bibliography

Karen de Bruin

Professor of French and scholar of 18th-century French literature

Anyone who has ever assembled a “works cited” section knows the dizzying array of styles, formats and specific punctuation rules required for a bibliography. What’s the Chicago Style rule on how to cite books? Do you use quotation marks or underline? Or is it italic? What about in A.P.A. style? A.I. has freed Ms. de Bruin from the most annoying parts of the task. “No more consulting handbooks, guidebooks, cheat sheets, Purdue Owl, fretting about the right punctuation, whether guidelines have changed, and how to cite a three-volume work written in the 18th century, translated by God knows who, edited by Jesus only knows, and originally published where?”

All of this has been replaced, in her words, by “peace, serenity and Claude” (the large language model).

She uses prompts like:

Please cite in MLA format the book University Finances by Dean O. Smith.

or

Give the mla citation for this article: www.chronicle.com/article/higher-eds-financial-roller-coaster

Occasionally Claude cites “Doe, Jane,” and Ms. de Bruin challenges the answer.

“Then, only then, does it respond that it took its best guess at the author because the article was behind a paywall,” she said.

Write up therapy plans

Alissa Swank

Psychotherapist

Ms. Swank uses A.I. to take unstructured notes from a visit and turn them into SOAP notes, which is a structured documentation format for health care providers. (It stands for Subjective, Objective, Assessment and Plan — a way of summarizing the visit and the next steps.) It saves her a couple of hours each week, she estimates, “but more so it helps me complete the task that is so easy to put off.”

As a ‘muse’

Marya Triandafellos

Visual artist

Ms. Triandafellos uses A.I. as inspiration for her art practice. She uploads dozens of images of her artwork to get the A.I. model to understand her style, then guides the model with prompts to generate new works based on her style. What she gets back are hundreds of abstract images in a grid:

Marya Triandafellos

She studies them the way a psychiatric patient interprets an inkblot test.

“I looked at each image and wondered what it reminded me of, reaching my subconscious,” she said.

From there, she sorts them into themes and uses them as a base for a more fully finished work. She also asks the model to be her critic:

Please act as an art critic and evaluate this piece based on its subject, themes, how it makes you feel, and historic connections. Consider how it may be connected to science or math. Then, provide me with an appropriate title.

“It may not be as nuanced as a human art critic,” she said, “but it does decipher key aspects of the work which I refine further.”

She doesn’t use A.I. to create final pieces, though: “I tried — and was bored and frustrated.”