Looks like Stanford disagrees, 13% of entry level work has been replaced by AI.
https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Canaries_BrynjolfssonChandarChen.pdf
Doubt
The Budget Lab is funded by Arnold Ventures, the California Community Foundation, Ford Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, NEO Philanthropy, Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and Yagan Family Foundation.
Juat FYI: Almost all these sources of funding for the lab this report is coming from have some kind of stake in AI themselves.
Yeah that headline seems like capitalists trying to calm down the masses.
Just bring on the leisure society with UBI. We’re awash in renewable energy, right? Why does everyone need to work, especially the meaningless kabuki theater of modern office work?
Oh, I didn’t realize Yale was this sloppy with their studies. I’ve seen over half a dozen people fired and replaced with AI.
More like they have been fired because of the AI hype and are expected to be replaced by AI. In reality however, another worker just has to work harder and use an AI agent to do less valuable work overall. A drop in quality will mean a drop in sales and they‘ll wish they didn‘t fire all those valuable workers who won‘t return for the same pay they had before.
Hmm I actually recall multiple high profile rounds of layoffs citing AI as the primary reason behind them. I guess they must have misspoken.
because hidding failing financial by pretending you are becoming more efficient is good if you have the foresight of a CEO (about 4 months total)
Saying out loud you are laying people off to meet a bonus quota is not good
What the fuck are they on?! Have you tried applying somewhere, only to get a rejection email before you close the tab? AI has been affecting jobs for years, get your head out your ass…
It’s not AI doing that.
IDK if you are in the USA, but the American economy is close to recession, and the job market is affected by that. I find it very plausible that AI hasn’t had the results we often hear, about increasing efficiency and replacing workers. Those stories are hyped, and probably also pushed by marketing people in the AI industry.
AI is mostly used to aid workers, and I suspect the efficiency boost isn’t nearly as impressive as is often claimed in media.Remember if a CEO betting on AI to cut cost or improve quality, was wildly successful, he (the company) would probably boast about it. For now all we hear are such companies EXPECTING those results, never that they actually achieved them.
I haven’t even tried applying to a tech company job (web developer) since I got laid off during the pandemic, so I’m going off of old data. Way before AI was the buzzword/next big thing, companies were using a form of “AI” to parse, and auto reject applications.
You are talking about 2 different applications of AI to the job market.
And? Doesn’t matter which application you’re talking about, the article states “AI has had zero impact…”.
Based on the context of current times, it’s fairly obviously about AI replacing jobs, rather than AI instead of the HR person being the one to throw your resume to the trash.
That is the title. There is an article beyond that.
They are using it as their current excuse for outsourcing.
The Yale researchers’ nothingburger result has precedent. In 2023, a study by the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) concluded that generative AI would probably not replace most workers.
A study of Danish workers published in April determined that generative AI had no material impact on wages or jobs. Another such study published in February found “overall employment effects are modest, as reduced demand in exposed occupations is offset by productivity-driven increases in labor demand at AI-adopting firms.”
There is some contradictory data.
No shit.
I used to get a lot more freelance writing and design gigs before AI. It was great under the table money because, at times, I recieve partial support for my disability, and they deduct from my monthly funds if I make money. It’s not enough to live on to begin with, so I relied on side gigs for any savings at all.
Now? I get none. Former clients have outright told me it’s just cheaper to use AI or Canva or whatever. I have friends with similar stories, so I wonder just how much of the unseen labor market was affected by this.
I don’t blame AI. It’s a neat technology and there’s nothing inherently wrong with. I blame capitalism for stealing from artists, building unsustainably, and for creating a world where people have to worry about lost funds from designing bullshit web graphics and business cards instead of having the time, money and bandwidth to follow our passions.
Not to worry! When the AI bubble bursts and drags down the US stock market with it, it’ll have an impact on jobs all right.
And my investment bank doesn’t let me short on it.
the ethics committee has investigated the ethics committee and has found it free of ethics!
Thank god, good that we paid bonuses to make that report. Well done folks, here’s an extra bonus for good results.
Yeah, that tracks with what I see, at least. Either it’s used as an excuse for layoffs that likely would happen anyway given the market, or they’re just included in a workflow without firing (the US was already in bad shape after COVID, with tech companies already laying off people they over-hired during lockdown)
I’ve got a friend who pays under the table to a guy to write and edit instructional videos, and still does that since there’s never enough videos to produce for her project. Just, now, the guy uses AI in his workflow and… I’d say maybe produces at about the same pace (fact checking the AI takes time, lol).
But basically, AI didn’t replace her copy writer / editor, they just scaled up (or at least, attempted to, lol).
Right after COVID, they used largely unnecessary back-to-work orders to trim the workforce. That was nice for them, as they don’t pay severance if you quit over back-to-work.
Now that is exhausted, they can still use AI as cover for hiring less and laying off workforce to avoid spooking investors into realizing they are contracting.
Also remember that tech companies tend to be evaluated based on insane growth predictions, so anything less than that can spook investors and crash their stock price. They are desperate for cover. Same reason they make lots of fake job postings they will never actually hire for. It’s all a shell game for the stock price.
I think ai was not just an excuse and that they layed off thinking they could somehow make it up with ai.
So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…
…what’s with people being mad about it?
I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.
Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.
So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?
It’s a boiling frog thing. AI and LLMs are shoved in our faces everywhere and it’s harder every day to opt out. Job boards are flooded with positions for human in the loop AI training or AI experience requirements. AI gen text, images, and video are obscuring an already muddled information space. They also draw an astronomical amount of energy which is detrimental to the global ecosystem. Meanwhile costs are going up, it’s borderline impossible to get a job, and people are scared this automation will push them out of employment without generating new jobs, especially if art and entertainment are taken over by gen AI. People are saying “I’m being boiled alive” but by the time there’s enough data to validate that we’ll already be stew.
The way information is presented matters too. When articles circulate they get often slanted and summarized (or people just read the headline and make assumptions). Key information gets tossed aside for easy talking points to support whichever narrative and the people affected feel unseen and unheard.
There’s a lot going on and it isn’t just “AI bad”
Yeah, but… this isn’t that.
You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.
We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.
And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.
They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.
I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.
Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.
Thank you for this counter-weight!
…when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house.
I love this and I’m stealing it.
Yup not contesting the article itself, but giving some explanation for all the anger you were wondering being about
Anger feels good. Especially anger that is socially validated. Being part of an angry mob means you get to feel righteous anger and not fear negative repercussions because everyone’s supporting you and providing cover for your bad behaviour.
And social media like this, where you can be an anonymous member of an angry mob? Candy for the human psyche.
Ai has been trained on current and past writing which could be considered plagiarism depending on if you’re asking an Ai CEO or not. My question is, what happens when most writing is done by Ai? Do they continue to train it but now on itself? Will the language models experience deterioration at that point?
That’s part of the reason these models haven’t improved much in the last year or so. They‘ve absorbed all the public facing internet and whatever copyrighted works they could get away with pirating (pretty much all printed work), and now they are faced with a brick wall. They haven’t come up with a way to create new content, to reinforce a „correct“ statistical model without causing model collapse, and I don’t think they ever will. The well (the public internet) is already thoroughly poisoned so they have to use a snapshot of the pre-LLM internet, not even an up to date one.
If it isn’t good enough after consuming almost the entirety of humanity’s written output since the invention of the printing press, it’s never going to be.
This is actually a problem a lot of people are working on, they used to call the resulting failure ‘model collapse’. Training AI on existing slop does tend to deteriorate and is overall a bad time for AI.
Even discounting the writing quality, we already have AI responses that reference AI hallucinations posted online as fact.
Also Reddit shitposts, there’s some notable examples of that.
it becomes even dumber… we are already there
It’s easy right now for companies to pretend layoffs are caused by the shit economy or tariffs.
