The emergence of AI technology has yet to create a jobs boom, research shows. Photo / Getty Images
Demand for workers with generative AI skills peaked the year ChatGPT launched and has waned in the past two years amid hype and concern over the technology’s impact, a study in Australia suggests.
New analysis from jobs platform Seek in collaboration with Australia’s Assistant Federal Employment Minister Andrew Leigh found that AI jobs made up a fraction of total open roles and typically attracted higher salaries.
The findings follow growing anxiety among creative professions, such as voice artists, about AI-driven job theft and job losses.
Generative AI creates text, images or other media by drawing from massive sets of data, and its uses are diverse, from being used by financial institutions to detect fraud to caregivers to tailoring bedtime stories for their audiences .
ChatGPT, launched in 2022 and owned by OpenAI, is a “big language model” program with an interactive chatbot that creates media output based on instructions from the user.
However, technology presents challenges and opportunities.
In Australia’s federal budget, A$39.9 million was committed to the development of AI policies and restrictions over the next five years.
How the technology will change the dynamics in the labor market, including its potential to save workers time and make them more productive, has generated considerable interest since the technology’s launch.
Higher demand for the skills needed to work with AI models is also an expected consequence of the technology’s proliferation.
Demand for AI skills had tripled since 2017, but jobs remain “extremely rare”, says Dr Leigh.
One in every 588 open roles on Seek met the definition of an AI job — which included mentions of technical keywords — with those numbers declining as a percentage of total jobs between 2022 and 2024.
Similar patterns were found when isolating job ads that simply mentioned “artificial intelligence” in the posting.
Surprisingly, AI jobs were most prevalent in science, technology and research roles, accounting for 6.3 percent of all mathematical science job advertisements.
But hiring in the sector has been slow overall as economic uncertainty takes a toll.
In April, information and communications technology job ads fell 33.4 percent from a year earlier, a bigger drop than any other sector based on separate Seek data.
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