AI is not yet replacing workers in the US, researchers find

By Ana Nicolaci da Costa, CNN

London (CNN) — ChatGPT is not yet causing the massive upheaval in the US labor market that many have feared since the chatbot’s launch in 2022, according to a new study by a research center at Yale University.

The study comes amid widespread concerns that the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence, the technology that underpins ChatGPT, could put many jobs at risk as US companies increasingly turn to AI to cut costs through greater automation.

The researchers looked at changes since the launch of ChatGPT in the distribution of workers among all the jobs available in the economy. The chatbot is underpinned by generative artificial intelligence technology, which can create original text, images and other content in response to prompts from users.

“By measuring this over the time generative AI has been publicly available, we can test the claim that AI is substantially changing the workforce by… pushing workers from one job to another, automating workers out of a job, or creating new jobs,” they said in the study, published by The Budget Lab Wednesday.

“Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy,” the researchers wrote.

However, they noted that the adoption of generative AI was at an early stage and that their analysis was not predictive of the future. The researchers plan to monitor relevant data monthly “to assess how AI’s job impacts might change.”

The chief executive of Anthropic, a leading AI lab, warned in May that AI could cause a dramatic spike in unemployment, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in January that today’s company leaders were the last generation to manage all-human workforces.

While the new study says AI isn’t yet impacting the broader labor force, there are a few specific examples of companies making big staffing decisions based on what they see as the technology’s potential.

In recent years, some tech firms, including file storage service Dropbox and language-learning app Duolingo, have cited AI as a reason for making layoffs. A survey in January showed a large share of employers globally planned to downsize their workforce as AI carries out some tasks.

But the limits of AI are becoming increasingly clear, as is the extra work it can potentially create as humans have to check the work produced by AI.

A recent report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that 95% of companies that try AI aren’t making any money from it.

One reason could be that “employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers” – a phenomenon known as “workslop,” according to a recent report in the Harvard Business Review.

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