Chiara Binelli (Università di Bologna)

Disruption or Augmentation? The Changing Demand for AI Skills in the Age of Generative AI

Abstract: 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 dataset on the universe of online job postings in four European countries and developing a detailed classification of AI skills and tasks, 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 thar are exposed to ChatGPT relative to not-exposed occupations. We find that GPT-3 has a positive and statistically significant impact on the share of AI job adds for occupations in the treated group relative to the control group so that the availability of generative AI increased the demand of occupations whose most frequent core task is automatable through ChatGPT. This finding is consistent with occupations that are potentially more substitutable by generative AI undergoing a job re-design so that generative AI can augment rather than fully substitute human labor. To the