Generative AI and jobs
Open accessAbstract
This study assesses the potential global exposure of occupations to Generative AI, particularly GPT-4. It predicts that the overwhelming effect of the technology will be to augment occupations, rather than to automate them. The greatest impact is likely to be in high and upper-middle income countries due to a higher share of employment in clerical occupations. As clerical jobs are an important source of female employment, the effects are highly gendered. Insights from this study underline the need for proactive policies that focus on job quality, ensure fair transitions, and that are based on dialogue and adequate regulation.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Cites
Jakubův, J., Chvalovský, K., Goertzel, Z., et al. (2023) · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · doi:10.4230/lipics.itp.2023.19 · Cited by 76,648 · see citing works
The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?
Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2017) · Technological Forecasting and Social Change · doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2016.08.019 · Cited by 8,727 · see citing works
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021) · Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · doi:10.1145/3442188.3445922 · Cited by 6,988 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Sceptics tend to believe that these machines are nothing more than “stochastic parrots” – powerful text summarizers, incapable of “learning” and producing original content, with little future for general purpose use and unsustainable computing costs (Bender et al. 2021).”
BackgroundRobots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets
Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2020) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/705716 · Cited by 4,088 · see citing works
The growth of low-skill service jobs and the polarization of the US labor market
Autor, D. H., & Dorn, D. (2013) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.103.5.1553 · Cited by 3,824 · see citing works
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
Bubeck, S., Chandrasekaran, V., Eldan, R., Gehrke, J., Horvitz, E., Kamar, E., Lee, P., Lee, Y. T., Li, Y., Lundberg, S., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.12712 · Cited by 1,526 · see citing works
Artificial Intelligence and Jobs: Evidence from Online Vacancies
Acemoglu, D., Autor, D., Hazell, J., & Restrepo, P. (2022) · Journal of Labor Economics · doi:10.1086/718327 · Cited by 1,193 · see citing works
A future that works: automation, employment, and productivity
Manyika, J., Chui, M., Miremadi, M., Bughin, J., George, K. F., Willmott, P., & Dewhurst, M. (2017) · Cited by 897 · see citing works
Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers
Lee, M. K., Kusbit, D., Metsky, E., & Dabbish, L. (2015) · Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2702123.2702548 · Cited by 823 · see citing works
What Can Machines Learn and What Does It Mean for Occupations and the Economy?
Brynjolfsson, E., Mitchell, T., & Rock, D. (2018) · AEA Papers and Proceedings · doi:10.1257/pandp.20181019 · Cited by 695 · see citing works
Revisiting the risk of automation
Arntz, M., Gregory, T., & Zierahn, U. (2017) · Economics Letters · doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2017.07.001 · Cited by 570 · see citing works
Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work
Addati, L., Cattaneo, U., Esquivel, V., & Valarino, I. (2018) · Cited by 567 · see citing works
GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models
Eloundou, T., Manning, S., Mishkin, P., & Rock, D. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.10130 · Cited by 545 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Some assessments go as far as suggesting that machine learning models, especially those based on large neural networks used by Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT, see Text Box 1), might have the potential to eventually become a general-purpose technology (Goldfarb, Taska, and Teodoridis 2023; Eloundou et al. 202…”
BackgroundThe Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Labor Market
Webb, M. (2019) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.3482150 · Cited by 531 · see citing works
Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk
Irani, L. (2015) · South Atlantic Quarterly · doi:10.1215/00382876-2831665 · Cited by 367 · see citing works
The Global Opportunity in Online Outsourcing
Kuek, S. C., Paradi-Guilford, C., Fayomi, T., Imaizumi, S., Ipeirotis, P. G., Pina, P., & Singh, M. (2015) · World Bank, Washington, DC eBooks · doi:10.1596/22284 · Cited by 306 · see citing works
Tubaro, P., Casilli, A. A., & Coville, M. (2020) · Big Data & Society · doi:10.1177/2053951720919776 · Cited by 262 · see citing works
Avi Goldfarb, B., Taska, B., & Teodoridis, F. (2022) · Research Policy · doi:10.1016/j.respol.2022.104653 · Cited by 222 · see citing works
The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the labour market
Lane, M., & Saint-Martin, A. (2021) · OECD social employment and migration working papers · doi:10.1787/7c895724-en · Cited by 141 · see citing works
Felten, E. W., Raj, M., & Seamans, R. (2019) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.3368605 · Cited by 128 · see citing works
Burning Glass Technologies’ data use in policy-relevant analysis
Cammeraat, E., & Squicciarini, M. (2021) · OECD science, technology and industry working papers · doi:10.1787/cd75c3e7-en · Cited by 91 · see citing works
Algorithmic management consequences for work organisation and working conditionsPreprint
Wood, A. J. (2021) · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · Cited by 89 · see citing works
Surawski, B. M. (2019) · Management · doi:10.2478/manment-2019-0007 · Cited by 66 · see citing works
Carbonero, F., Davies, J., Ernst, E., Fossen, F. M., Samaan, D., & Sorgner, A. (2023) · Journal of Evolutionary Economics · doi:10.1007/s00191-023-00809-7 · Cited by 49 · see citing works
Back to the future: A continuity of dialogue on work and technology at the ILO
Cherry, M. A. (2019) · International Labour Review · doi:10.1111/ilr.12156 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
Politics by Automatic Means? A Critique of Artificial Intelligence Ethics at Work
Cole, M., Cant, C., Ustek-Spilda, F., & Graham, M. (2022) · Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.3389/frai.2022.869114 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
Eisfeldt, A. L., Schubert, G., Zhang, M. B., & Taska, B. (2023) · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4436627 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
Robotics and reshoring - Employment implications for developing countries
de Mattos, F. B., Dasgupta, S., Jiang, X., et al. (2020) · Cited by 12 · see citing works
Mobile internet, skills and structural transformation in Rwanda
Caldarola, B., Sanfilippo, M., Occelli, M., & Grazzi, M. (2022) · International Labour Office eBooks · doi:10.54394/xstk4695 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
Warehouse Technologies in Retail Operations: The Case of Voice Picking
Matopoulos, A. (2011) · doi:10.1002/9781444339895.ch12 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Improving Open Language Models by Learning from Organic InteractionsPreprint
Xu, J., Ju, D., Lane, J., et al. (2023) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2306.04707 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Towards an International Standard for Regulating Algorithmic Management: A BlueprintPreprint
Adams‐Prassl, J., Rakshita, S., Abraha, H. H., et al. (2024) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4684947 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
The regulation of collective dismissals: Economic rationale and legal practicePreprint
Muller, M. A. A. A. (2020) · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
“ChatGPT seems too good to be true”: College students’ use and perceptions of generative AI
Baek, C., Tate, T., & Warschauer, M. (2024) · Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1016/j.caeai.2024.100294 · Cited by 150 · see citing works
Soto-Sanfiel, M. T., Angulo-Brunet, A., & Lutz, C. (2024) · doi:10.31235/osf.io/bvyku · Cited by 20 · see citing works
- Authors
- Gmyrek, P., Berg, J., Bescond, D., & International Labour Organization. Research Department
- Venue
- International Labour Office eBooks
- Publisher
- ILO
- Published
- 2023
- OpenAlex
- W4386170955
- Semantic Scholar
- 6abec4bd11e60496a248c85c48c1e3abde3657e0
- Cited by
- 140
- References
- 33
- Citations by year
- 2026: 64 · 2025: 45 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 6
- FWCI
- 44.10
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- International Labour Office eBooks (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Econstor (Econstor) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Labor market dynamics and wage inequality
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Keywords
- generative AI, GPT-4, occupational exposure, automation, clerical occupations, women's employment, job quality, labour market transitions, AI regulation
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review