Disruption or Augmentation? The Changing Demand for AI Skills in the Age of Generative AI
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We study how the introduction of generative AI (GPT-3) has impacted the demand for AI-related skills in the European labour market. Using a novel large-scale collection of online job advertisements in in twenty two European Union countries and the United Kingdom, we develop a detailed classification of AI skills and tasks, and we exploit the release of GPT-3 in November 2022 as a natural experiment and apply a difference-in-differences estimation to assess the shifts in the demand for AI skills for occupations that are exposed to ChatGPT relative to not-exposed occupations. We find that GPT-3 had a negative and statistically significant impact on the share of AI job ads for occupations in the treated group relative to the control group, so that the availability of generative AI decreased the demand for occupations whose most frequent core task is automatable through ChatGPT. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that proposes a detailed classification framework and robust identification strategy to study the impact of generative AI on labour demand.
