ChatGPT will transform home work

ChatGPT is revolutionizing work. AI-powered chatbot that can write sophisticated responses to almost any request and has passed an MBA examIS holding himself out as a coder and is already helping with professional writing. In the few short months since its public launch in 2022, it has transformed the future of white-collar work and provoked an intense debate: Will HE steal our jobs? But over the same period, ChatGPT has also quietly begun to shape work in another, less heralded but equally influential area: the home.

Just as workers have tested the software to see how it can ease office tasks, others have experimented with how it can ease the burden of unpaid domestic work. Many are using it to plan meals and create grocery lists. For some it has become ad hoc family travel planner and planning assistant. Others are testing his mettle for it budget for a house and do until the bedtime story.

ChatGPT and other forms of generative artificial intelligence are poised to become a fixture in American homes, similar to other virtual assistants like Alexa. While chatbots can change HOW certain domestic tasks are performed, it is less clear whether they can really affect our more persistent domestic challenges: considerable amount of time still spent on housework and the inequality in how that work is shared.

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People who have started using ChatGPT for their personal to-do lists have found it incredibly useful, especially for one-off tasks. For Raina Kumra, founder of the company Spicewell and mother of two in Santa Monica, California, organizing summer camps for her children every year has been a chore. Many of the camp options she’s interested in only last one week, so finding enough that didn’t conflict with each other to cover the entire summer vacation involved creating charts, researching options, and creating a calendar. After all that, she had to register online, coordinate carpools as needed, find afternoon childcare if the camp was half-day, and pay all the fees for both of her kids, which they can afford in thousands of dollars. This year, she was afraid of him. I turned to AI for help simply out of desperation, she told me. Within seconds of entering her question, the software generated a comprehensive plan that (with some modifications) she actually plans to use. It included a good range of activities, from traditional options like sports, art and nature, to more unexpected choices like robotics, cooking and yoga. That saved her dozens of hours of work, she said.

Unfortunately, there were still dozens of hours of work left to do. Even though HE found summer camps and made the schedule, she couldn’t complete any of the other steps including perhaps the biggest one of getting her kids to camp every day. As much as ChatGPT can do, there’s only so much it can’t touch. Can share recipes but can’t cook meals. It can create a daily chore chart, but it can’t wash the dishes or take out the trash. Even the steps he helps with still need supervision. Most people would want to review a financial plan created by ChatGPT before implementing it, for example. And despite the clever planning she did for Kumra, some of the summer camp names she gave her were a bit off, she was still able to find them online, but it took more Googling. Some people who have used family vacation planning software have complained about cliché suggestions and recommended spots being closed (probably because the software has limited knowledge of the world after 2021).

In the coming years, many of these bottlenecks are likely to be resolved. But Ekaterina Hertog, the leader of The University of Oxford’s ongoing DomesticAI research project, which is looking at what AI has done (and will do) for housework in the UK and Japan, points out that more advanced AI won’t necessarily translate directly into time saved on housework. The introduction of new technology into the home addresses work tasks in both intentional and unintentional ways. Take washing machines, which seemed like they would easily cut down on the time people spent cleaning clothes by hand. And they reduced the burden of laundry, but not as much as you might expect, because after their introduction, hygiene standards rose and people began to clean their clothes more often.

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Hertog suspects a similar situation could occur with AI. It will likely take practice to learn to write queries that get the most relevant and useful responses. And if software makes its way into home life, how much work will it be to teach kids to use it (and supervise them to make sure they’re doing it safely)? Even more immediately, will it raise our standards for dietary variety by having easy access to new meal plans, leading to more time for cooking and shopping?

That second scenario seems to be playing out already for Carole Alalouf, an animation company owner who lives in Montreal with her two teenagers and her husband. Because she has a family of picky eaters on the Mediterranean diet, her husband is keto, and two of her family members don’t eat pork or shellfish, she cooks the same things over and over, which drives me bananas, she told me. ChatGPT immediately gave him some fun new ideas. One of her favorites was Saganaki, a Greek fried halloumi cheese dish that she’s enjoyed in restaurants but never thought to make at home. But while it may save you from having to search for recipes and make a grocery list, AI-assisted meal planning risks adding some of those hours back to the time spent finding hard-to-find ingredients. find or prepare unfamiliar foods more slowly.

If ChatGPT can save even an average of a few minutes a day, that would be significant progress given that at the population level, time devoted to housework has not increased significantly in more than two decades, Melissa Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto. , told me. Plus, because women do far more housework than men in heterosexual marriages do 1.7 times as much as their husbands, for example, they may also benefit more from any reduction. Kumra thinks ChatGPT will 100 percent help moms with all our unpaid work, she told me via email.

But time is only one part of the gender inequality in domestic work. According to Eve Rodsky, the author of the book Game without cheats, a task has three components: The first is the conception, or observation, of what needs to be done; then comes planning; and then comes the execution, or actually doing it. ChatGPT is great for planning and can be useful in execution as well. But so far, it really doesn’t help with conception. It will never be able to tell you that your second son needs adenoids removed. It will never help to notice that your children’s bangs have grown in front of their eyes, Rodsky told me. Noticing and keeping track of everything that needs to be done is where the mental workload really lives.

A common way of thinking about how housework plays out in many heterosexual couples is that women tend to act as managers and men as helpers, assigned by their wives. ChatGPT is probably best viewed as another helper. Sometimes clumsily and sometimes brilliantly it will complete the tasks delegated to it, but an AI is no substitute for an equal partner. Rather, it is simply a reflection of the culture that created it. The softwares occasionally sexist results it’s proof that it sometimes reflects our worst impulses. But for couples working to create a fair division of labor in their family, it can also have the potential to mirror our best intentions. The best case scenario is that AI becomes a home assistant reporting to two equal managers.