The study also detailed workers’ varied feelings about the tool. One participant compared it to the fire Prometheus stole from the gods to help mortals. Another told Dr. Lakhani’s colleague Fabrizio Dell’Acqua that ChatGPT felt like junk food — hard to resist, easy to consume but ultimately bad for the consumer.

In the near future, language bots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemini are expected to take on many white-collar tasks, like copy writing, preparing legal briefs and drafting letters of recommendation. The study is one of the first to show how the technology might affect real office work — and office workers.

“It’s a well-designed study, particularly in a nascent area like this,” said Maryam Alavi, a professor at the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved in the experiments. Dr. Alavi, who has studied the impact of new digital technology on workers and organizations, also noted that the study “really points out how much more we need to learn.’’

The study recruited management consultants from Boston Consulting Group, one of the world’s largest management-consulting firms. The company had barred its consultants from using A.I. bots in their work.

“We wanted it to involve a large set of real workers working on real tasks,” said François Candelon, a managing director of the company who helped design the experiments.