Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
theregister.com
theregister.com
Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would have cost hundreds of dollars to get from a licensed tax agent. And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out.
What call. Maybe some readers miss the (perhaps subtle) difference between "Generative AI is not ..." and "Generative Ai is not going to ..."
Then first can be based on fact, e.g., what has happened so far. The second is based on pure speculation. No one knows what will happen in the future. HN is continually being flooded with speculation, marketing, hype.
In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is is based on what has happened so far. There is no "call" being made. Only an examination of what has heppened so far. Facts not opinions.
Could be data is lagging as sibling comment said but this seems wildly difficult to report on a number like this.
It also doesn't take into account the benefits to colleagues of active users of LLMs (second order savings).
My use of LLMs often means I'm saving other people time because I can work through issues without communications loops and task switching. I can ask about much more important, novel items of discussion.
This is an important omission that lowers the paper's overall value and sets it up for headlines like this.
What happened in 2023 and 2024 actually
Nitpicky but it's worth noting that last year's AI capabilities are not the April 2025 AI capabilities and definitely won't be the December 2025 capabilities.
It's using deprecated/replaced technology to make a statement, that is not forward projecting. I'm struggling to see the purpose. It's like announcing that the sun is still shining at 7pm, no?
But I think it's pretty clear what the parent poster means - that it's too early to imply that GenAI won't impact jobs.
Obviously you understood that that was the point parent wanted to make - because you argue against it.
But here's the thing - there is already plenty of documented proof of individuals losing their job to ChatGPT. This is an article from 2 years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki...
Early on in a paradigm shift, when you have small moves, or people are still trying to figure out the tech, it's likely that individual moves are hard to distinguish from noise. So I'd argue that a broad-based, "just look at the averages" approach is simply the wrong approach to use at this point in the tech lifecycle.
FWIW, I'd have to search for it, but there were economic analyses done that said it took decades for the PC to have a positive impact on productivity. IMO, this is just another article about "economists using tools they don't really understand". For decades they told us globalization would be good for all countries, they just kinda forgot about the massive political instability it could cause.
> In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is based on what has happened so far.
Not true. The article specifically calls into question whether the massive spending on AI is worth it. AI is obviously an investment, so determine whether it's "worth it", you need to consider future outcomes.
It's more about automating workflows that are already procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health, finance, etc).
Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs, your medical history, your preferences, etc. But gathering all of that information requires a mix of collecting medical records, talking to the patient, etc. Once that information is available, we can execute a fairly procedural plan to put together a diet that will likely work for you.
These are cases that I believe LLMs are actually very well suited, if the solution can be designed in such a way as to limit hallucinations.
> Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs
No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive. and I would know, I've had to use one to help me manage an eating disorder!
There is already so much bullshit in the diet space that adding AI bullshit (again, using the technical definition of bullshit here) only stands to increase the value of an interaction with a person with knowledge.
And that's without getting into what happens when brand recommendations are baked into the training data.
0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it.
Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are developing. Very junior developers are hired mostly as an investment so they become productive and stay with the company. AI might help with some of this but doesn’t really replace anyone in the process.
For support, there is massive value in talking to another human and having them trying to solve your issue. LLMs don’t feel much better than the hardcoded menu style auto support there already is.
I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs
>I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs
No way. NFTs did not make any headway in "the real world": their value proposition was that their cash value was speculative, like most other Blockchain technologies, and that understandably collapsed quickly and brilliantly. Right now developers are using LLMs and they have real tangible advantages. They are more successful than NFTs already.
I'm a huge AI skeptic and I believe it's difficult to measure their usefulness while we're still in a hype bubble but I am using them every day, they don't write my prod code because they're too unreliable and sloppy, but for one shot scripts <100 lines they have saved me hours, and they've entirely replaced stack overflow for me. If the hype bubble burst today I'd still be using LLMs tomorrow. Cannot say the same for NFTs
How exactly is this different from getting advice from someone who acts confidently knowledgeable? Diet advice is an especially egregious example, since I can have 40 different dieticians give me 72 different diet/meal plans with them saying 100% certainty that this is the correct one.
It's bad enough the AI marketers push AI as some all knowing, correct oracle, but when the anti-ai people use that as the basis for their arguments, it's somehow more annoying.
Trust but verify is still a good rule here, no matter the source, human or otherwise.
People talk a lot of about false info and hallucinations, which the models do in fact do, but the examples of this have become more and more far flung for SOTA models. It seems that now in order to elicit bad information, you pretty much have to write out a carefully crafted trick question or ask about a topic so on the fringes of knowledge that it basically is only a handful of papers in the training set.
However, asking "I am sensitive to sugar, make me a meal plan for the week targeting 2000cal/day and high protein with minimally processed foods" I would totally trust the output to be on equal footing with a run of the mill registered dietician.
As for the junior developer thing, my company has already forgone paid software solutions in order to use software written by LLMs. We are not a tech company, just old school manufacturing.
It doesn't have to. It can replace having no support at all.
It would be possible to run a helpdesk for a free product. It might suck but it could be great if you are stuck.
Support call centers usually work in layers. Someone to pick up the phone who started 2 days ago and knows nothing. They forward the call to someone who managed to survive for 3 weeks. Eventually you get to talk to someone who knows something but can't make decisions.
It might take 45 minutes before you get to talk to only the first helper. Before you penetrate deep enough to get real support you might lose an hour or two. The LLM can answer instantly and do better than tortured minimum wage employees who know nothing.
There may be large waves of similar questions if someone or something screwed up. The LLM can do that.
The really exciting stuff will come where the LLM can instantly read your account history and has a good idea what you want to ask before you do. It can answer questions you didn't think to ask.
This is specially great if you've had countless email exchanges with miles of text repeating the same thing over and over. The employee can't read 50 pages just to get up to speed on the issue, if they had the time you don't so you explain again for the 5th time that delivery should be on adress B not A and be on these days between these times unless it are type FOO orders.
Stuff that would be obvious and easy if they made actual money.
LLM:s create real value. I save a bunch of time coding with an LLM vs without one. Is it perfect? No, but it does not have to be for still creating a lot of value.
Are some people hyping it up too much? Sure, an reality will set in but it wont blow up. It will rather be like the internet. 2000s and everyone thought "slap some internet on it and everything will be solved". They overestimated the (shorterm) value of the internet. But internet was still useful.
But it is replacing it. There's a rapidly-growing number of large, publicly-traded companies that replaced first-line support with LLMs. When I did my taxes, "talk to a person" was replaced with "talk to a chatbot". Airlines use them, telcos use them, social media platforms use them.
I suspect what you're missing here is that LLMs here aren't replacing some Platonic ideal of CS. Even bad customer support is very expensive. Chatbots are still a lot cheaper than hundreds of outsourced call center people following a rigid script. And frankly, they probably make fewer mistakes.
> and it will blow up like NFTs
We're probably in a valuation bubble, but it's pretty unlikely that the correct price is zero.
Can't disagree more (on LLMs. NFTs are of course rubbish). I'm using them with all kinds of coding tasks with good success, and it's getting better every week. Also created a lot of documents using them, describing APIs, architecture, processes and many more.
Lately working on creating an MCP for an internal mid-sized API of a task management suite that manages a couple hundred people. I wasn't sure about the promise of AI handling your own data until starting this project, now I'm pretty sure it will handle most of the personal computing tasks in the future.
It doesn’t wholly replace the need for human support agents but if it can adequately handle a substantial number of tickets that’s enough to reduce headcount.
A huge percentage of problems raised in customer support are solved by otherwise accessible resources that the user hasn’t found. And AI agents are sophisticated enough to actually action on a lot of issues that require action.
The good news is that this means human agents can focus on the actually hard problems when they’re not consumed by as much menial bullshit. The bad news for human agents is that with half the workload we’ll probably hit an equilibrium with a lot fewer people in support.
Have you somehow managed to avoid the last several decades of human-sourced dieting advice?
Google is pretty much useless now as it changed into ann ad platform, and I suspect AI will go the same way soon enough.
Jevons law in action: some pieces of work get lost, but lower cost of doing work generates more demand overall...
For copywriting, analyzing contracts, exploring my business domain, etc etc. Each of those tasks would have required me to consult with an expert a few years ago. Not anymore.
Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not.
Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what was going on.
Potentially all situations where I would’ve paid (or paid more than I already was) a local laborer for that advice. Or at a minimum spent much more time googling for the info.
You can use a penny and your eyeballs to assess this, and all it costs is $0.01
Me: "Looks like your tire is a little low."
Youth: "How can you tell, where's your phone?"
1) Yes. I had in fact already booked the appointment, but decided to try asking Gemini for shits and giggles.
2) I did google, but I didn't know an official calculator existed, and the search results presented me with a morass of random links that I couldn't make heads or tails of. Remember, I'm not a domain expert in this area.
But, also, the threshold of things we manage ourselves versus when we look to others is constantly moving as technology advances and things change. We're always making risk tradeoff decisions measuring the probability we get sued or some harm comes to us versus trusting that we can handle some tasks ourselves. For example, most people do not have attorneys review their lease agreements or job offers, unless they have a specific circumstance that warrants they do so.
The line will move, as technology gives people the tools to become better at handling the more mundane things themselves.
But are those really the same? You're not paying the tax agent to give you the advice per se: even before Gemini, you could do your own research for free. You're really paying the tax agent to provide you advice that you can trust without having to go to the extra steps of doing deep research.
One of the most important bits of information I get from my tax agent is, "is this likely to get me audited if we do it?" It's going to be quite some time before I trust AI to answer that correctly.
I wouldn't be saving on tax advisors. Moreover, I would hire two different tax advisors, so I could cross check them.
Are LLMs finally going to be the breakthrough that changes this? Maybe. The anthropomorphized chat experience where you feel like you're talking to a person definitely helps. So does the confident style of LLM answers, which sound expert and definitive.
But I'm not sure it will work for everyone, or even for the majority. Many people lack the background knowledge, vocabulary, patience, and persistence to get good results from their own research. I've seen plenty of people who struggle to use Google effectively, and I suspect these same people will have trouble getting helpful answers on complex topics from an LLM.
They scored about 60% this month. That sounds good until you consider that 60% is a failing grade for the bar exam, and a licensed lawyer getting 40% of their legal advice wrong would be disbarred.
The legal profession specifically saw the rise of computers, digitization of cases and records, and powerful search... it's never been easier to "self help" - yet people still hire lawyers.
These examples aren't wrong but you might be overstating their impact on the economy as a whole.
E.g. the overwhelming majority of people do not pay solely for tax advice, or have a dietician, etc. Corporations already crippled their customer support so there's no remaining damage to be dealt.
Your tax example won't move the needle on people who pay to have their taxes done in their entirety.
That is a great use for it too, rather than replacing artists we have personal advisors who can navigate almost any level of complex bureaucracy instantaneously. My girlfriend hates AI, like rails against it at any opportunity, but after spending a few hours on the DMV website I sat down and fed her questions into Claude and had answers in a few seconds. Instant convert.
That’s like buying a wrench and changing your own spark plugs. Wrenches are not putting mechanics out of business.
Sounds like reddit could also do a good job at this, though nobody said "reddit will replace your jobs". Maybe because not as many people actively use reddit as they use generative AI now, but I cannot imagine any other reason than that.
Even if every job that exists today were currently automated _people would find other stuff to do_. There is always going to be more work to do that isn't economical for AIs to do for a variety of reasons.
This fact is so simple and yet here we are having arguments about it. To me people are conflating an economic assessment - whose jobs are going to be impacted and how much - with an aspirational one - which of your acquaintances personally could be replaced by an AI, because that would satisfy a beef.
The only thing I can remotely trust is my own experience. Recently, I decided to have some business cards made, which I haven't done in probably 15 years. A few years ago, I would have either hired someone on Fiverr to design my business card or pay for a premade template. Instead, I told Sora to design me a business card, and it gave me a good design the first time; it even immediately updated it with my Instagram link when I asked it to.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how AI, as we now know it, doesn't take the wind out of the sails of certain kinds of jobs.
Your accountant also is probably saving hundreds of dollars in other areas using AI assistance.
Personally I still think you should cross check with a professional.
> including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing
If that’s true, probably for the best that those jobs get replaced. Then again, the value may have been in the personal touch (pay to feel good about your decisions) rather than quality of directions.
If AI replaces search, I do wonder how long before AI becomes just as enshittified as search did. You know google/OpenAI/etc will eventually need to make this stuff profitable. And subscriptions aren't currently doing that.
I doubt it.
Search already "obsoletes" these fields in the same way AI does. AI isn't really competing against experts here, but against search.
It's also really not clear that AI has an overall advantage over dumb search in this area. AI can provide more focused/tailored results, but it costs more. Keep in mind that AI hasn't been enshittified yet like search. The enshittification is inevitable and will come fast and hard considering the cost of AI. That is, AI responses will be focused and tailored to better monetize you, not better serve you.
So…all you needed was a decent search engine, which in the past would have been Google before it was completely enshittified.
Yes.
"...all you need" A good search engine is a big ask. Google at its height was quite good. LLMs are shaping up to be very good search engines
That would be enough, for me to be very pleased with them
This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news, does kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the audience still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline.
"Like all ‘magic’ in Tolkien, [spiritual] power is an expression of the primacy of the Unseen over the Seen and in a sense as a result such spiritual power does not effect or perform but rather reveals: the true, Unseen nature of the world is revealed by the exertion of a supernatural being and that revelation reshapes physical reality (the Seen) which is necessarily less real and less fundamental than the Unseen" [1].
The writing and receiving of resumes has been superfluous for decades. Generative AI is just revealing that truth.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/04/25/collections-how-gandalf-proved...
First, LLMs are a distillation of our cultural knowledge. As such they can only reveal our knowledge to us.
Second, they are limited even more so by the users knowledge. I found that you can barely escape your "zone of proximal development" when interacting with an LLM.
(There's even something to be said about prompt engineering in the context of what the article is talking about: It is 'dark magic' and 'craft-magic' - some of the full potential power of the LLM is made available to the user by binding some selected fraction of that power locally through a conjuration of sorts. And that fraction is a product of the craftsmanship of the person who produced the prompt).
This is completely untrue. Google Search still works, wonderfully. It works even better than other attempts at search by the same Google. For example, there are many videos that you will NEVER find on Youtube search that come up as the first results on Google Search. Same for maps: it's much easier to find businesses on Google Search than on maps. And it's even more true for non-google websites; searching Stack Overflow questions on SO itself is an exercice in frustration. Etc.
In other words, there is a lot more spam in the world. Efficiencies in hiring that implicitly existed until today may no longer exist because anyone and their mother can generate a professional-looking cover letter or personal web page or w/e.
Where input' is a distorted version of input. This is the new reality.
We should start to be less impressed volume of text and instead focus on density of information.
Always was.
Not because the LLM is better, but because the search is close to unusable.
Resume filtering by AI can work well on the first line (if implemented well). However, once we get to the the real interview rounds and I see the CV is full of AI slop, it immediately suggests the candidate will have a loose attitude to checking the work generated by LLMs. This is a problem already.
I think the plastic surgery users disagree here: it seems like visible plastic surgery has become a look, a status symbol.
Well their Search revenue actually went up last quarter, as all quarters. Overall traffic might be a bit down (they don't release that data so we can't be sure) but not revenue. While I do take tons of queries to LLMs now, the kind of queries Google actually makes a lot of money on (searching flights, restaurants etc) I don't go to an LLM for - either because of habit or because of fear these things are still hallucinating. If Search was starting to die I'd expect to see it in the latest quarter earnings but it isn't happening.
Note also that ad blockers are much less prevalent on mobile.
The general tone of this study seems to be "It's 1995, and this thing called the Internet has not made TV obsolete"; same for the Acemoglu piece linked elsewhere in the. Well, no, it doesn't work like that, it first comes for your Blockbuster, your local shops and newspaper and so on, and transforms those middle class jobs vulnerable to automation into minimum wages in some Amazon warehouse. Similarly, AI won't come for lawyers and programmers first, even if some fear it.
The overarching theme is that the benefits of automation flow to those who have the bleeding edge technological capital. Historically, labor has managed to close the gap, especially trough public education; it remains to be seen if this process can continue, since eventually we're bound to hit the "hardware" limits of our wetware, whereas automation continues to accelerate.
So at some point, if the economic paradigm is not changed, human capital loses and the owners of the technological capital transition into feudal lords.
Similar thing goes to delivery. Moving single pallet to store or replacing carpets or whatever. Lot of complexity if you do not offload it to receiver.
More regular the environment is easier it is to automate. A shelving in store in my mind might be simpler than all environments where vehicles need to operate in.
And I think we know first to go. Average or below average "creative" professionals. Copywriter, artists and so on.
(Racist memes and furry pornography doesn't count.)
There's also going to be a shrinkage in the workforce caused by demographics (not enough kids to replace existing workers).
At the same time education costs have been artificially skyrocketed.
Personally the only scenario I see mass unemployment happening is under a "Russia-in-the-90s" style collapse caused by an industrial rugpull (supply chains being cut off way before we are capable of domestically substituting them) and/or the continuation of policies designed to make wealth inequality even worse.
What you are truly seeking is high level specifications for automation systems, which is a flawed concept to the degree that the particulars of a system may require knowledgeable decisions made on a lower level.
However, CAD/CAM, and infrastructure as code are true amplifiers of human power.
LLMs destroy the notion of direct coupling or having any layered specifications or actual levels involved at all, you try to prompt a machine trained in trying to ascertain important datapoints for a given model itself, when the correct model is built up with human specifications and intention at every level.
Wrongful roads lead to erratic destinations, when it turns out that you actually have some intentions you wish to implement IRL
And even if we solve this problem of hallucination, the ai agents still need a platform to do search.
If I was Google I’d simply cut off public api access to the search engine.
Google search is fraught with it's own list of problems and crappy results. Acting like it's infallible is certainly an interesting position.
>If I was Google I’d simply cut off public api access to the search engine.
The convicted monopolist Google? Yea, that will go very well for them.
What people call "AI slop" existed before AI and AI where I control the prompt is getting to be better than what you will find on those sorts of websites.
When a sector collapses and become irrelevant, all its workers no longer need to be employed. Some will no longer have any useful qualifications and won't be able to find another job. They will have to go back to training and find a different activity.
It's fine if it's an isolated event. Much worse when the event is repeated in many sectors almost simultaneously.
Here's my own take:
- It is far too early to tell.
- The roll-out of ChatGPT caused a mind-set revolution. People now "get" what is possible already now, and it encourages conceiving and persuing new use cases on what people have seen.
- I would not recommend any kinds to train to become a translator for sure; even before LLMs, people were paid penny amounts per word or line translated, and rates plummeted further due to tools that cache translations in previous versions of documents (SDL TRADOS etc.). The same decline not to be expected for interpreters.
- Graphic designers that live from logo designs and similar works may suffer fewer requests.
- Text editors (people that edit/proofread prose, not computer programs) will be replaced by LLMs.
- LLMs are a basic technology that now will be embedded into various products, from email clients over word processors to workflow tools and chat clients. This will take 2-3 years, and it may reduce the number of people needed in an office with a secretarial/admin/"analyst" type background after that.
- Industry is already working on the next-gen version of smarter tools for medics and lawyers. This is more of a 3-5 year development, but then again some early adopters started already 2-3 years ago. Once this is rolled out, there will be less demand for assitants-type jobs such as paralegals.
But I already trust my dentist. A new dentist deferring to AI is scary, and obviously will happen.
The mistake on mine was caught when a radiologist checked over the work of the weekend X-ray technician who missed a hairline crack. A second look is always good, and having one look be machine and the other human might be the best combo.
Why aren’t you using the AI x-ray? Because it too often misdiagnoses things and I have to spend even more time double checking. And I still have to get a radiologist consult.
Why are you frustrated that we swapped out the blood testing thingamabob with an AI machine? Because it takes 10 minutes to do what took me 30 seconds with a microscope and is STILL not doing the full job, despite bringing this up multiple times.
Why aren’t you relying more on the AI text to speech for medical notes? Because the AVMA said that a doctor has to review all notes. I do, and it makes shit up in literally every instance. So I write my own and label the transcription as AI instead of having to spend even more time correcting it.
The best part is that the majority of vets (at least in this city) didn’t do medical notes for pets. Best you’d often get when asking is a list of costs slapped together in the 48 hours they had to respond. Now, they just use the AI notes without correcting them. We’ve gone from zero notes, so at least the next doctor knows to redo everything they need, to medical notes with very frequent significant technical flaws but potentially zero indication that it’s different from a competent doctor’s notes.
This is the wrong direction, and it’s not just new doctors. It’s doctors who are short on time doing what they can with tools that promised what isn’t being delivered. Or doctors being strong armed into using tools by the PE owners who paid for something without checking to see if it’s a good idea. I honestly do believe that AI will get there, but this is a horrible way to do it. It causes harm.
This is such a broad category that I think it's inaccurate to say that all editors will be automated, regardless of your outlook on LLMs in general. Editing and proofreading are pretty distinct roles; the latter is already easily automated, but the former can take on a number of roles more akin to a second writer who steers the first writer in the correct direction. Developmental editors take an active role in helping creatives flesh out a work of fiction, technical editors perform fact-checking and do rewrites for clarity, etc.
Do you mean Philip Tetlock? He wrote Superforecasting, which might be what you're referring to?
It has been a very, very long time since editors have been proof-reading prose for typos and grammar mistakes, and you don't need LLMs for that. Good editors do a lot more creative work than that, and LLMs are terrible at it.
As an example, many companies have recently shifted their support to "AI first" models. As a result, even if the team or certain team members haven't been fired, the general trend of hiring for support is pretty much down (anecdotal).
I agree that some automation is better for the humans to do their jobs better, but this isn't one of those. When you're looking for support, something has clearly went wrong. Speaking or typing to an AI which responds with random unrelated articles or "sorry I didn't quite get that" is just evading responsibility in the name of "progress", "development", "modernization", "futuristic", "technology", <insert term of choice>, etc.
Both of those can be true, because companies are placing bets that AI will replace a lot of human work (by layoffs and reduced hiring), while also using it in the short term as a reason to cut short term costs.
Software development jobs there have bigger threat: outsourcing to cheaper locations.
As well for teachers: it is hard to replace a person supervising kids with a chatbot.
Both your experience and what the article (research) says can be valid at the same time. That’s how statistics works.
The .com boom and bust is an apt reference point. The technological shift WAS real, and the value to be delivered ultimately WAS delivered…but not in 1999/2000.
It may be we see a massive crash in valuations but AI still ends up the dominant driver of software value over the next 5-10 years.
While LLM trend is already going to the dumpster(notice how we no longer receive 1b/4b/8b models from Meta since LLama4 and similar competitors but only from china?), I firmly believe that commodity hardware will improve in this race to allow running LLMs(or their next iteration) on regular devices and become as ubiquitous as Siri/Cortana.
Maybe instead look at the US in 2025. EU labor regulations make it much harder to fire employees. And 2023 was mainly a hype year for GenAI. Actual Enterprise adoption (not free vendor pilots) started taking off in the latter half of 2024.
That said, a lot of CEOs seem to have taken the "lay off all the employees first, then figure out how to have AI (or low cost offshore labor) do the work second" approach.
Case in point: Klarna.
2024: "Klarna is All in on AI, Plans to Slash Workforce in Half" https://www.cxtoday.com/crm/klarna-is-all-in-on-ai-plans-to-...
2025: "Klarna CEO “Tremendously Embarrassed” by Salesforce Fallout and Doubts AI Can Replace It" https://www.salesforceben.com/klarna-ceo-tremendously-embarr...
For example, the mass layoffs of federal employees.
Apparently not, since the sort of specific work which one used to find for this has all but vanished --- every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance where someone who might have contracted for an image did not (ditto for stock images, but that's a different conversation).
This is not at all true. Some percentage of AI generated images might have become a contract, but that percentage is vanishingly small.
Most AI generated images you see out there are just shared casually between friends. Another sizable chunk are useless filler in a casual blog post and the author would otherwise have gone without, used public domain images, or illegally copied an image.
A very very small percentage of them are used in a specific subset of SEO posts whose authors actually might have cared enough to get a professional illustrator a few years ago but don't care enough to avoid AI artifacts today. That sliver probably represents most of the work that used to exist for a freelance illustrator, but it's a vanishingly small percentage of AI generated images.
I prefer to get my illegally copied images from only the most humanely trained LLM instead of illegally copying them myself like some neanderthal or, heaven forbid, asking a human to make something. Such a though is revolting; humans breathe so loud and sweat so much and are so icky. Hold on - my wife just texted me. "Hey chat gipity, what is my wife asking about now?" /s
Most if it wasn't bespoke assets created by humans but stock art picked by if lucky, a professional photo editor, but more often the author themselves.
It feels very short-sighted from the company side because I nope'd right out of there. They didn't make me feel any trust for the company at all.
I'd still hire an entry level graphic designer. I would just expect them to use these tools and 2x-5x their output. That's the only changing I'm sensing.
That said I don’t think entry level illustration jobs can be around if software can do their job better than they do. Just like we don’t have a lot of calculators anymore, technological replacement is bound to occur in society, AI or not.
Well at least that's the potential.
"Equip yourself with skills that other people are willing to pay for." –Thomas Sowell
Instead of uploading your video ad you already created, you'll just enter a description or two and the AI will auto-generate the video ads in thousands of iterations to target every demographic.
Google is going to run away with this with their ecosystem - OpenAI etc al can't compete with this sort of thing.
And on the other end we'll have "AI" ad blockers, hopefully. They can watch each other.
For me, the most interesting takeaway. It's easy to think about a task, break it down into parts, some of which can be automated, and count the savings. But it's more difficult to take into account any secondary consequences from the automation. Sometimes you save nothing because the bottleneck was already something else. Sometimes I guess you end up causing more work down the line by saving a bit of time at an earlier stage.
This can make automation a bit of a tragedy of the commons situation: It would be better for everyone collectively to not automate certain things, but it's better for some individually, so it happens.
in this case, the total cost would've gone up, and thus, eventually the stakeholder (aka, the person who pays) is going to not want to pay when the "old" way was cheaper/faster/better.
> It would be better for everyone collectively to not automate certain things, but it's better for some individually, so it happens.
not really, as long as the precondition i mentioned above (the total cost dropping) is true.
But there's also adversarial situations. Hiring would be one example: Companies use automated CV triaging tools that make it harder to get through to a human, and candidates auto generate CVs and cover letters and even auto apply to increase their chance to get to a human. Everybody would probably be better off if neither side attempted to automate. Yet for the individuals involved, it saves them time, so they do it.
> AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation
But Generative AI is not just AI chatbots. There are ones that generate sounds/music, ones that generates imagines etc.
Another thing is, the research only looked Denmark, a nation with fairly healthy altitude towards work-life-balance, not a nation that gives proud to people who work their own ass off.
And the research also don't cover the effect of AI generated product: if music or painting can be created by an AI within just 1 minute based on prompt typed in by a 5 year old, then your expected value for "art work" will decrease, and you'll not pay the same price when you're buying from a human artist.
Opposite to your testimony, I know one designer who's an out sourced contractor for a game company. The last time we talked, he's genuinely worried about generative AI, and witnessed layoffs due to the expectation that such tech would replace workers (specially ones who has singular function).
So, yes, there are people who's livelihood has already being negatively effected by AIs. Maybe those are just "DIY people", not "pro-like-me", maybe.
I am 100% convinced that Ai will and already has destroyed lots of Jobs. We will likely encounter world order disrupting changes in the coming decades when computer get another 1000 times faster and powerful in the coming 10 years.
The jobs described might get lost (obsolete or replaced) as well in the longer term if AI gets better than them. For example just now another article was mentioned in HN: "Gen Z grads say their college degrees were a waste of time and money as AI infiltrates the workplace" which would make teachers obsolete.
Sadly for several decades, as computers got faster, only tracking and ads got more pervasive. Also as hardware became stronger, computer games, media quality improved. We also got planet burning blockchain and crypto mining for a while.
In terms of intelligence, we started with clippy, Eliza, stayed with Cortana and Siri, now have LLMs. We will move forward with LLMs for a while until something more impressive comes out and mirrors more humane nature.
Also GenZ is literally second worst off generation after the silent generation, growing up in unprecedented prosperity to be only be stunted by global pandemic following by crazy oligarchs trying to bring back techno-feudal age while their parents prepare to sell of the last glimmer of inheritance to finance retirement and healthcare. I honestly do not blame them.
It sounds like they didn't ask those who got laid off.
> Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI. The company is going to be ‘AI-first,’ says its CEO.
https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-repla...
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And within that article:
> von Ahn’s email follows a similar memo Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sent to employees and recently shared online. In that memo, Lütke said that before teams asked for more headcount or resources, they needed to show “why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”
Or in other words the CEO had proven entirely out of touch with the actual work and how far away he is removed from entire company operation.
It is like expecting cars to replace horses before anyone starts investing in the road network and getting international petroleum supply chains set up - large capital investment is an understatement when talking about how long it takes to bring in transformative tech and bed it in optimally. Nonetheless, time passed and workhorses are rare beasts.
Seen a whole lot of gen AI deflecting customer questions which would have been previously tickets. That is a reduced ticket volume that would have been taken by a junior support engineer.
We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to the level 0 IT support.
And this trend isn't new; a lot of investments into e.g. customer support is to need less support staff, for example through better self-service websites, chatbots / conversational interfaces / phone menus (these go back decades), or to reduce expenses by outsourcing call center work to low-wage countries. AI is another iteration, but gut feeling says they will need a lot of training/priming/coaching to not end up doing something other than their intended task (like Meta's AIs ending up having erotic chats with minors).
One of my projects was to replace the "contact" page of a power company with a wizard - basically, get the customers to check for known outages first, then check their own fuse boxes etc, before calling customer support.
1: https://xkcd.com/806/ - from an era when the worst that could happen was having to speak with incompetent, but still human, tech support.
1) AI/automation will replace jobs. This is 100% certain in some cases. Look at the industrial revolution.
2) AI/automation will increase unemployment. This has never happened and it's doubtful it will ever happen.
The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years after the industrial revolution started, we still have single-digit unemployment.
> The reason is that humans always adapt and find ways to be helpful that automation can't do. That is why after 250 years after the industrial revolution started, we still have single-digit unemployment.
Horses, for thousand of years, were very useful to humans. Even with the various technological advances through that time their "unemployment" was very low. Until the invention and perfection of internal combustion engines.
To say that it is doubtful that it will ever happen to us is basically saying that human cognitive and/or physical capabilities are without bounds and that there is some reason that with our unbounded cognitive capabilities we will never be able to create a machine that could replicate those capabilities. That is a ridiculous claim.
https://economics.mit.edu/news/daron-acemoglu-what-do-we-kno...
I have a 185 year old treatise on wood engraving. At the time, to reproduce any image required that it be engraved in wood or metal for the printer; the best wood engravers were not mere reproducers, as they used some artistry when reducing the image to black and white, to keep the impression from continuous tones. (And some, of course, were also original artists in their own right). The wood engraving profession was destroyed by the invention of photo-etching (there was a weird interval before the invention of photo etching, in which cameras existed but photos had to be engraved manually anyway for printing).
Maybe all the wood engravers found employment; although I doubt it. But at this speed, there will be a lot of people who won't be able to retrain during employment and will either have to use up their savings while doing so, or have to take lower paid jobs.
This is how engraving went too. It wasn't overnight. The tools were not distributed evenly and it was a good while before amateurs could produce anything like what the earlier professionals did.
Because you can buy a microwave and pizza rolls doesn't make you a chef. Maybe in 100 years the tooling will make you as good as the chefs of our time, but by then they'll all be doing even better work and there are people who will pay for higher quality no matter how high the bar is raised for baseline quality so eliminating all work in a profession is rare.
I'm a little confused by your point here:
>This is how engraving went too. It wasn't overnight. The tools were not distributed evenly and it was a good while before amateurs could produce anything like what the earlier professionals did.
In the case of engraving, most engravers weren't the original artist. The artist would draw their illustration on a wood blank, and the engraver would convert it to a print block. So artists were not completely replaced by photographers, except for journalistic sketchers, but the entire process changed and eliminated the job of engraving. Sure, high end artist-engravers kept going, but jobbing engravers were out of luck.
There are still a few artists who specialise in engraving. But the point here isn't whether a few of the most accomplished professionals will still be in demand, but what happens to the vast bulk of average people.
This is the wrong question.
The question should be to hiring managers: Do you expect LLM based tools to increase or decrease your projected hiring of full time employees?
LLM workflows are already *displacing* entry-level labor because people are reaching for copilot/windsurf/CGPT instead of hiring a contract developer, researcher, BD person. I’m watching this happen across management in US startups.
It’s displacing job growth in entry level positions across primary writing copy, admin tasks or research.
You’re not going to find it in statistics immediately because it’s not a 1:1 replacement.
Much like the 1971 labor-productivity separation that everyone scratched their head about (answer: labor was outsourced and capital kept all value gains), we will see another asymptote to that labor productivity graph based on displacement not replacement.
The overall rate of participation in the labor work force is falling. I expect this trend to continue as AI makes the economy more and more dynamic and sets a higher and higher bar for participation.
Overall GDP is rising while labor participation rate is falling. This clearly points to more productivity with fewer people participating. At this point one of the main factors is clearly technological advancement, and within that I believe if you were to make a survey of CEOS and ask what technological change has allowed them to get more done with fewer people, the resounding consensus would definitely be AI
I was able to pre-process the agreement, clearly understand most of the major issues, and come up with a proposed set of redlines all relatively easily. I then waited for his redlines and then responded asking questions about a handful of things he had missed.
I value a lawyer being willing to take responsibility for their edits, and he also has a lot of domain specific transactional knowledge that no LLM will have, but I easily saved 10 hours of time so far on this document.
Currently I have initiated a lawsuit in my US state's small claims civil court, over a relatively simple payment dispute. Without the ability to bounce legal questions/tact/procedurals off of Perplexity, I wouldn't have felt comfortable enough to represent myself in court.
Even if I were to need a lawyer on this simple case, the majority of the "leg work" has already been completed by free, non-pay LLMs.
My court date is early June; I'm both nervous and excited (for restitution)!
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I have a judge brother and have been arguing for years that law clerking is probably in its last gasps of career-entry; Chief Justice Roberts's end of 2023 SCOTUS report was a refreshing read to share among family members (which argued that LLMs will provide more accessibility to judiciary by commoners).
Personally, I already would rather have a jury of LLMs deciding most legal outcomes (albeit would need to be impartially programmed, if that's even possible). Definitely would make for better democratic accessibility.
I found Bruce Schneier's recent article "Reimagining Democracy" [1] quite an interesting thought experiment (which is about his hosting intellectuals in their discussions of creating entirely new democracies utilizing modern technologies). It'd be super fair if a trusted AI government could lead to better democracies than "modern capitalism" can / has.
[1] schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/reimagining-democracy-2.html
As a father, my forward-thinking vision for my kids is that creativity will rule the day. The most successful will be those with the best ideas and most inspiring vision.
We're coming up in 3 years of ChatGPT and well over a year since I started seeing the proliferation of these 10X claims, and yet LLM users seem to be bearing none of the fruit one might expect from a 10X increase in productivity.
I'm beginning to think that this 10X thing is overstated.
This has never been the truth of the world, and I doubt AI will make it come to fruition. The most successful people are by and large those with powerful connections, and/or access to capital. There are millions of smart, inspired people alive right now who will never rise above the middle class. Meanwhile kids born in select zip codes will continue to skate by unburdened by the same economic turmoil most people face.
It'd still suck to lose your job / vocation though, and some of those won't be able to find a new job.
For all those 250 years most people have predicted that the next new technology will make the replaced workforce permanently unemployed, despite the track record of that prediction. We constantly predict poverty and get prosperity.
I kinda get why: The job loss is concrete reality while the newly created jobs are speculation.
Still, I'm confident AI will continue the extremely strong trend.
At no point did that company choose to pivot to GenAI to cut costs and reduce headcount. It's more reactive than that.
It doesn't work: even for the tiny slice of human work that is so well defined and easily assessed that it is sent out to freelancers on sites like Fiverr, AI mostly can't do it. We've had years to try this now, the lack of any compelling AI work is proof that it can't be done with current technology.
You can't build on top of it: unlike foundational technologies like the internet, AI can only be used to build one product, a chatbot. The output of an AI is natural language and it's not reliable. How are you going to meaningfully process that output? The only computer system that can process natural language is an AI, so all you can do is feed one AI into another. And how do you assess accuracy? Again, your only tool is an AI, so your only option is to ask AI 2 if AI 1 is hallucinating, and AI 2 will happily hallucinate its own answer. It's like The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Cat E trying to clean up the mess Cat D made trying to clean up the mess Cat C made and so on.
And it won't get any better. LLMs can't meaningfully assess their training data, they are statistical constructions. We've already squeezed about all we can from the training corpora we have, more GPUs and parameters won't make a meaningful difference. We've succeeded at creating a near-perfect statistical model of wikipedia and reddit and so on, it's just not very useful even if it is endlessly amusing for some people.
Can you pinpoint the date which LLMs stagnated?
More broadly, it appears to me that LLMs have improved up to and including this year.
If you consider LLMs to not have improved in the last year, I can see your point. However, then one must consider ChatGPT 4.5, Claude 3.5, Deepseek, and Gemini 2.5 to not be improvements.
I'm worried the shock will not be abrupt enough to encourage a proper rethink.
So, as of yet, according to these researchers, the main effect is that of a data pump, certain corporations get a deep insight into people's and other corporation's inner life.
I'm not saying that I think LLMs are useless, far from it, I use them when I think it's a good fit for the research I'm doing, the code I need to generate, etc., but the way it's being pushed from a marketing perspective tells me that companies making these tools need people to use them to create a data moat.
Extremely annoying to be getting these pop-ups to "use our incredible Intelligence™" at every turn, it's grating on me so much that I've actively started to use them less, and try to disable every new "Intelligence™" feature that shows up in a tool I use.
The boards in turn instruct the CEOs to "adopt AI" and so you get all the normal processes about deciding what/if/when to do stuff get short circuited and so you get AI features that no one asked for or mandates for employees to adopt AI with very shallow KPIs to claim success.
The hype really distorts both sides of the conversation. You get the boosters for which any use of AI is a win, no matter how inconsequential the results, and then you get things like the original article which indicate it hasn't caused job losses yet as a sign that it hasn't changed anything. And while it might disprove the hype (especially the "AI is going to replace all mental labour in $SHORT_TIMEFRAME" hype), it really doesn't indicate that it won't replace anything.
Like when has a technology making the customer support experience worse for users or employees ever stopped it's rollout if there's cost savings to be had?
I think this why AI is so complicated for me. I've used it, and I can see some gains. But it's on the order of when IDE auto complete went from substring matches of single methods to when it could autocomplete chains of method calls based on types. The agent stuff fails on anything but the most bite size work when I've tried it.
Clearly some people seem it as something more transformative than that. There's other times when people have seen something transformative and it's just been so clearly nothing of value (NFTs for example) that it's easy to ignore the hype train. The reason AI is challenging for me is it's clearly not nothing, but also it's so far away from the vision that others have that it's not clear how realistic that is.
It's very telling that we see "we won't use your data for training" sometimes and opt-outs but never "we won't collect your data". 'Training' being at best ill defined.
This reminds me of some early stage startup pitches. During a pitch, I might ask: "what do you think about competitor XYZ?" And sometimes the answer is "we don't think highly of them, we have never even seen them in a single deal we've competed for!" But that's almost a statistical tautology: if you both have .001% market share and you're doubling or tripling annually, the chance that you're going to compete for the same customers is tiny. That doesn't mean you can just dismiss that competitor. Same thing with the article above dismissing AI as a threat to jobs so quickly.
To give a concrete example of a job disappearing: I run a small deep tech VC fund. When I raised the fund in early '24, my plan was to hire one investor and one researcher. I hired a great investor, but given all of the AI progress I'm now 80% sure I won't hire a researcher. ChatGPT is good enough for research. I might end up adding a different role in the near future, but this is a research job that likely disappeared because of AI.
In the future, we will do a lot more.
In other terms: There will be a lot more work. So even if robots do 80% of it, if we do 10x more - the amount of work we need humans to do will double.
We will write more software, build more houses, build more cars, planes and everything down the supply chain to make these things.
When you look at planet earth, it is basically empty. While rent in big cities is high. But nobody needs to sleep in a big city. We just do so because getting in and out of it is cumbersome and building houses outside the city is expensive.
When robots build those houses and drive us into town in the morning (while we work in the car) that will change. I have done a few calculations, how much more mobility we could achieve with the existing road infrastructure if we use electric autonomous buses, and it is staggering.
Another way to look at it: Currently, most matter of planet earth has not been transformed to infrastructure used by humans. As work becomes cheaper, more and more of it will. There is almost infinitely much to do.
That said, the fact that I can't find an opensource LLM front-end which will accept a folder full of images to run a prompt on sequentially, then return the results in aggregate is incredibly frustrating.
I think we are at a crossroads as to what this will result in, however. In one case, the benefits will accrue at the top, with corporations earning greater profits while employing less people, leaving a large part of the population without jobs.
In the second case, we manage to capture these benefits, and confer them not just on the corporations but also the public good. People could work less, leaving more time for community enhancing activities. There are also many areas where society is currently underserved which could benefit from freed up workforce, such as schooling, elderly care, house building and maintenance etc etc.
I hope we can work toward the latter rather than the former.
In other words, this more likely answers the question "If customer support agents all use ChatGPT or some in-house equivalent, does the company need fewer customer support agents?" than it answers the question "If we deploy an AI agent for customers to interact with, can it reduce the volume of inquiries that make it to our customer service team and, thus, require fewer agents?"
As with all other technologies the jobs it removes are not normally in country that introduces it but that they never happen elsewhere.
For example, while the automated looms that the Luddites were protesting about didn't result in significant job losses in the UK. How much clothing manufacturing has been curtailed in Africa because of it and similar innovations since that have lead to cheap mass produced clothes making it uneconomic to produce there.
As suggest by this report, Denmark and West will probably be make good elsewhere and be largely unaffected.
However, places like India, Vietnam with large industries based on call centres and outsourced development servicing the West are likely to be more vulnerable.
The real AI impact is happening at companies that have never hired anyone yet. You need to think: should this job even exist before hiring and design the processes at your company to achieve good-enough results with AI before even considering hiring anyone. I think Sam Altmans prediction of a billion-dollar-one-man-companies is spot on - you just need a single driver to coordinate AI agents.
Ironically I think YCs all-in bet on AI investments is precisely what will bring about its downfall - one of the first jobs to go will be tech venture capital because you only need VC money to hire.
They are saying AI is not replacing jobs but every week we get news about companies cutting hundreds or thousands of jobs and replacing these jobs with AI, and other news about companies halting hiring because of AI, so how AI is not replacing jobs?
And then markets are flooded with new unemployed workers replaced by AI, and it's is well known inside the Economics and by common folks too that when markets have abundant labor wages go down. So how AI is not hurting wages?
Demand for software has high elasticity
Anecdotal situation - I use ChatGPT daily to rewrite sentences in the client reports I write. I would have traditionally had a marketing person review these and rewrite them, but now AI does it.
Ever since the explosion in popularity of the internet in the 2000's, anything journalism related has been in terminal decline. The arrival of the smartphones accelerated this process.
Be wary of people trying to deflect the away from the managerial class for these issues.
I know it’s replaced marketing content writers in startups. I know it has augmented development in startups and reduced hiring needs.
The effects as it gains capability will be mass unemployment.
Truth is, companies that don’t need layoffs are pushing employees to use AI to supercharge their output.
You don’t grow a business by just cutting costs, you need to increase revenue. And increasing revenue means more work, which means it’s better for existing employees to put out more with AI.
You already see attorneys using it to write briefs; often to hilarious effect. These are clearly the precursor though to a much reduced need to for Jr / associate level attorneys at firms.
If each of my developers is 30% more productive that means we can ship 30% more functionally which means more budget to hire more developers. If you think you’ll just pocket that surplus you have another thing coming.
We will have to get to 100% test coverage and document everything and add more bells and whistles to UI etc. The day to day activity may change but there will always be developers.
Sometimes that decrease in quality is matched by an increase in reach / access, and so the benefits can outweigh the costs. Think about language translation in web browsers and even smart spectacles, for example. Language translation has been around forever but generally limited to popular books or small-scale proprietary content because it was expensive to use mult-lingual humans to do that work.
Now even my near-zero readership blog can be translated from English to Portuguese (or most other widely used languages) for a reader in Brazil with near-zero cost/effort for that user. The quality isn't as good as human translation, often losing nuance and style and sometimes even with blatant inaccuracies, but the increased access offered by language translation software makes the lower standard acceptable for lots of use cases.
I wouldn't depend on machine translation for critical financial, healthcare, or legal use cases, though I might start there to get the gist, but for my day-to-day reading on the web, it's pretty amazing.
Software at scale is different than individuals engaging in leisure activities. A loss of nuance and occasional catastrophic failures in a piece of software with hundreds of millions or billions of users could have devastating impacts.
even customer service bots are just nicer front ends for knowledge bases.
So I find this result improbable, at best, given that I personally know several people who had to scramble to find new ways of earning money when their opportunities dried up with very little warning.
the rest is fugazi
>Coding AIs increasingly look like autonomous agents rather than mere assistants: taking instructions via Slack or Teams and making substantial code changes on their own, sometimes saving hours or even days
I'm someone who tries to avoid AI tools. But this paper is literally basing its whole assessment off of two things; wages and hours. This is a disingenuous assertion.
Lets assume that I work 8 hours per day. If I am able to automate 1h of my day with AI, does that mean I get to go home 1 hour early? No. Does that mean I get an extra hour of pay? No.
So the assertion that there has been no economic impact assumes that the AI is a separate agent that would normally be paid in wages for time. That is not the case.
The AI is an augmentation for an existing human agent. It has the potential to increase the efficiency of a human agent by n%. So we need to be measuring the impact that is has on effectiveness and efficiency. It will never offset wages or hours. It will just increase the productivity for a given wage or number of hours.
Either mathematics sucks or economists suck. Real hard choice.
watch out for headcount lacking in segments of the market
Imagine if a tool made content writers 10x as productive. You might hire more, not less, because they are now better value! You might eventually realise you spent too much, but this will come later.
ADAIK no company I know of starts a shiny new initiative by firing, they start by hiring then cutting back once they have their systems in place or hit a ceiling. Even Amazon runs projects fat then makes them lean AFAIK.
There's also pent up demand.
You never expect a new labour saving device to cost jobs while the project managers are in the export building phase.
The wise, will displace economists and consultants with LLMs, but the trend followers will hire them to prognostic about the future impact - such that the net affect could be zero.
I would say the use cases are only coming into view.
And any important jobs won’t be replaced because managers are too lazy and risk averse to try AI.
We may never see job displacement from AI. Did you know bank teller jobs actually increased in the decades following the roll out of ATMs.