(Credit: Luis Alvarez via Getty Images)
Despite widespread fear about AI taking jobs, new research that looked at the Danish labor market shows that AI adoption has yet to have a significant impact on jobs or wages.
The paper examine the labor market effects of AI chatbots, drawing from survey data collected from 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark, analyzed by economists from the University of Chicago and the University of Copenhagen. The paper looked at professions like accountancy, IT support specialists, teaching, journalism, and software development, many of which have been tipped for an AI overhaul by famous faces like Bill Gates.
The researchers said their findings “challenged narratives of imminent labor market transformation due to Generative AI.” The paper found that though AI produced modest productivity gains with an average time saving of 3% per worker—just a few hours in an average working month—this was actually counteracted by the new tasks created by AI.
Anders Humlum, an economist who worked on the study, thinks these lower-than-may-be-expected productivity gains may be due to the difficulty of applying AI directly to real-world tasks, at least without significant extra steps. "First, most tasks do not fall into that category where ChatGPT can just automate everything," he said in an interview with The Register.
AI chatbots reportedly created new job tasks for 8.4%of workers. "One very stark example that is close to home for me is there are a lot of teachers who now say they spend time trying to detect whether their students are using ChatGPT to cheat on their homework," said Humlum.
Humlum also pointed to how workers are spending significant amounts of time assessing the quality of AI output—for example, checking or debugging the code produced by a chatbot, or drafting prompts for AIs.
This isn't to say that workers are simply ignoring the potential of AI chatbots. Humlum said chatbot adoption has been "remarkably fast" in the professions they looked at, boosted by many employer initiatives, but that this "really has not moved the needle" when it comes to real-world outcomes by wages or employment features.
However, even if AI's short-term impact on jobs and wages may not be world-changing in the short term, this is unlikely to change the pessimistic views of the average American. Only 23% of Americans predict AI will have a positive impact on how people do their jobs, compared to 73% of AI experts, according to Pew Center research, which surveyed 5,400 adults.