No Great Equalizer: Experimental Evidence on Productivity Effects of Generative AI Use in the UK Labor Market
Journal
SSRN Electronic Journal
ISSN
1556-5068
Type
working paper
Date Issued
2025-03-23
Author(s)
Abstract
An emerging consensus holds that generative artificial intelligence (AI) equalizes workers' performance within tasks, reducing productivity differences across workers. Existing research has largely studied productivity within single occupational groups and task structures. Whether this equalizing pattern generalizes to the labor market at large remains unclear. Observed performance equalization within groups of workers is compatible with both increasing and decreasing inequality between groups. To distinguish these outcomes, we conducted a large pre-registered online experiment with a sample of the UK working age population which randomly assigned participants to treatments that encouraged or discouraged the use of ChatGPT and then asked them to complete a set of realistic work tasks. We find that ChatGPT use increased productivity in all tasks, with greater benefits observed in more complex and less ambiguous tasks. However, compression effects between tasks were limited. Moreover, Chat-GPT use did not affect productivity differentials between gender, age, educational or occupational groups.
Keywords
artificial intelligence
labor market
productivity
inequality
experiment
technological change
Refereed
No
Publisher
Elsevier BV
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open.access
Name
Haslberger et al. (2025) No Great Equalizer - Experimental Evidence on Productivity Effects of Generative AI Use in the UK Labor Market.pdf
Size
1.77 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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