How will Language Modelers like ChatGPT Affect Occupations and Industries?

By Edward W. Felten, Manav Raj, Robert C. Seamans. 2023

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent dramatic increases in AI language modeling capabilities has led to many questions about the effect of these technologies on the economy. In this paper we present a methodology to systematically assess the extent to which occupations, industries and geographies are exposed to advances in AI language modeling capabilities. We find that the top occupations exposed to language modeling include telemarketers and a variety of post-secondary teachers such as English language and literature, foreign language and literature, and history teachers. We find the top industries exposed to advances in language modeling are legal services and securities, commodities, and investments. We also find a positive correlation between wages and exposure to AI language modeling.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Large Language Models, AI Ethics, Fairness & Society

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Citations in the corpus

GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models (2023, methodology): “…to worker task descriptions (Webb, 2020; Meindl et al., 2021), linking AI capabilities to occupational abilities documented in the O*NET database (Felten et al., 2018, 2023), aligning AI task benchmark evaluations with worker tasks via cognitive abilities (Tolan et al., 2021), labeling…”
AI Transparency in the Age of LLMs: A Human-Centered Research Roadmap (2023, background): “These generative models are widely expected to have impact across industries, changing the way we engage in tasks like writing, programming, and design, and reshaping occupations in medicine, law, marketing, education, and beyond [3, 22, 40, 41, 52, 113].”
Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligence (2023, background): “The emergence of powerful generative AI technologies reintroduces a host of classic questions in a new context (3-5).”