Generative AI has no impact on wages and employment — economists' study
A new study has shown that generative artificial intelligence is not yet reducing wages, replacing workers, or significantly saving working hours.
A new study has shown that generative artificial intelligence is not yet reducing wages, replacing workers, or significantly saving working hours.
As TechRadar reports, new research from the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago has found that generative chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have had minimal impact on the job market.
The analysis involved approximately 25,000 workers in Denmark working in 11 occupations with a high degree of AI impact. It found that there were no noticeable changes in either earnings or working hours after the introduction of these technologies. The authors of the study, Anders Gumlum and Emily Westergaard, also noted the absence of significant economic effects, in particular on overall employment and the wage bill at the enterprise level.
At the same time, the study found that companies that actively encourage employees to use AI and provide training significantly increase the adoption rate of these technologies. For example, enterprise investments almost doubled the adoption rate of AI, from 47% to 83%.
However, the average reduction in working hours due to AI is only 2,8%, or just over an hour per week of a standard 40-hour workweek. Only 8,4% of workers reported the emergence of new types of work, such as teachers who monitor the integrity of AI use, editors of AI output, or specialists who improve queries for chatbots.
In many cases, the expected time savings were accompanied by additional tasks that even increased the workload. As a result, only 3–7% of workers were able to turn the saved time into additional earnings.
According to the authors, «although generative chatbots are already widely used, they only save some time and create new work tasks, but the overall impact on the labor market remains limited.» They also emphasized that «labor market rigidity delays the economic impact of AI, and success depends on how companies integrate these technologies.»
This study makes it clear that despite the active discussion about the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence, its real impact on jobs and incomes remains limited so far.
Meanwhile, Google’s chief scientist recently said that AI will be able to master the level of Jun’s in programming as early as next year.
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