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Time Magazine
25-05-2025
- Science
- Time Magazine
Who does AI help the most?
By One of the big questions about genAI's implication for work is whether it gives a greater performance boost to less experienced, lower-performing workers or more experienced, higher-performing workers. Research skews toward the former, but a few studies have found that access to genAI tools like ChatGPT help high performers more. One of the most well-known studies in the second camp has now been discredited. The paper—which was widely covered in media outlets, including Charter —found, among other things, that a genAI tool that helped material scientists discover new materials helped high-performing scientists significantly more than it helped their lower-performing peers. The author of the paper is no longer at MIT, and the university said it now 'has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.' This came as a shock to us, as that research was important to our understanding of how AI may impact work and inequality. Given its retraction, we wanted to synthesize what the other current research says about this question of whether AI will widen or narrow performance gaps between workers. The question matters for understanding whether AI will increase inequality, explains Rembrand Koning, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who co-authored a paper on this topic. But, he adds, it also has important implications for how AI might impact less experienced workers. 'If [AI] helps people with more experience, [who] tend to be the people who can do things better, it might take out the lowest rungs of the labor market because we think AI can have such large effects.' Longer term, Koning adds, 'there may be policy solutions or organizational changes that can get around some of these problems…we need to know the facts to start understanding how the economy might respond.' Most studies that look into this question find that genAI has an equalizing effect, helping less experienced, lower-performing workers more than their more experienced, higher-performing peers. With the retraction of the material sciences paper, I know of only a few papers that have found the opposite to be true. The AI-as-an-equalizer result has shown up in studies of everything from customer-support work to writing and consulting tasks. There are two important aspects of these studies to keep in mind when applying their results to other settings. First, the tasks in question are areas where we know AI already performs very well. Second, in these studies, what the genAI tool produces is often relatively close to—or, in some cases, is—the final product. So the mechanism through which AI levels the playing field in these studies is essentially by doing much, sometimes most, of the work. The AI-widens-performance-gaps result has shown up in a few papers, including one that looked at college students in a debate competition and another that studied entrepreneurs in Kenya. Both studies suggest judgment plays a crucial role in whether or not someone benefits from AI. In the Kenya context, for example, the AI tool provided a range of advice to entrepreneurs and it was up to them to decide what to do with it. 'Those who have the judgment do better because they're able to be like, 'Yeah, these 10 pieces of advice—six are terrible, two are neutral, two are actually really good. Let me focus on the two that can actually help my business,'' explains Harvard Business School's Koning, one of the study's co-authors. So, will AI widen or narrow performance gaps? My view is that it depends on a job's level of autonomy. If you're in a job where you help set your goals, determine how to reach those goals, and make many decisions throughout your day, AI likely helps you more if you're a high performer with strong judgment. If, however, you're in a role that's more constrained, requires less decision-making, and performs a pre-defined set of tasks that AI can do well, then AI likely narrows the performance gap. 'The way I think of that is when you start your day and you're looking at the possible number of paths you can go down…how many paths could I possibly choose? And then how different are the end destinations of those paths?' explains Ben Weidmann, director of research at the Harvard Skills Lab and co-author of a related paper. 'My hypothesis, which is very similar to yours…is that jobs where there are more paths are going to disproportionately have the AI gains go to people who are high-skilled' in their decision-making capabilities, says Weidmann. 'The other way to think about it is [whether] the AI [is] producing the inputs or the outputs for your job,' says Koning. In many of the studies that find that AI narrows performance gaps, the AI's output becomes the worker's output, with varying degrees of editing. Koning points out that in the debate and entrepreneurship studies, the AI's answers were the inputs for the tasks of debating an opponent or making critical business decisions and implementing them.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
AI in the workplace is nearly 3 times more likely to take a woman's job as a man's, UN report finds
As AI transforms workplaces, the technology has an outsized impact on women's jobs, according to new data from the United Nations' International Labour Organization and Poland's National Research Institute. To help future-proof their careers, women can use AI to augment their jobs, but are less likely to engage with the technology than their male counterparts, according to Harvard Business School professor Rembrand Koning. As workers grapple with anxiety around artificial intelligence replacing them, women in the workplace may have extra reason to fear. Jobs traditionally held by women are much more exposed to AI than those traditionally held by men, according to new data from the United Nations' International Labour Organization (ILO) and Poland's National Research Institute (NASK). In higher income countries, jobs with the highest risk of AI automation make up about 9.6% of women's jobs, compared to 3.5% of jobs among men, the report released Tuesday found. More broadly, 25% of global jobs are potentially exposed to generative AI, a percentage that increases to 34% among higher income countries. The report notes clerical and administrative jobs have the highest exposure to AI, which could be one reason why AI poses an outsized risk to women workers. Between 93% and 97% of secretary and administrative assistant positions in the U.S. were held by women between 2000 and 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Comparatively, women made up between 40% and 44% of the workforce in the same 20-year period. Secretaries and administrators are the fifth most common professions for women in the U.S., according to the Department of Labor. Notably, the study does not mention caretaker jobs such as health aides that require emotional labor and are more likely to be held by women; they are considered more AI-proof. While AI has shown potential to gobble up jobs like software engineers and computer programmers, the technology may also threaten entry-level positions across white-collar industries beyond administrative roles. A Bloomberg report in April found AI could replace more than half the tasks performed by market research analysts and two-thirds of tasks done by sales representatives. The technology could perform only 9% and 21% of the respective tasks of those positions' managers. The ILO-NASK report isn't meant to say that AI will eliminate clerical or entry-level jobs. Rather, these jobs still require human involvement in some capacity, and identifying jobs that AI can partially complete can help prepare the workforce in those industries for technological changes. 'This index helps identify where GenAI is likely to have the biggest impact, so countries can better prepare and protect workers,' Marek Troszyński, senior expert at NASK, said in the report. Rembrand Koning, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, believes one key to women future-proofing workplace roles that may be more exposed to AI is to follow the framework of viewing AI as a tool, not a threat. 'This goes back to the distinction between automation versus augmentation when we think about AI,' Koning told Fortune. 'We can think of this as a threat, which is that it's going to automate away a lot of these clerical jobs that might be held more by women. On the other hand, we can think of AI as automating a lot of this work, of allowing [workers] to take on tasks that might be higher paying, or that there might be more competition.' While Koning sees a path forward for workers to use AI to their benefit, he also sees a gender barrier: Women are using AI tools at an average 25% lower rate than men, his research found. There's not one clear reason for this disparity, Koning said, but one explanation outlined in a working paper co-authored by Koning is women are more concerned about the ethics of AI. Some fear they will be judged as cheating for using the technology or that leaning on AI tools will cause male colleagues to question their intelligence. 'Men seem to be much more confident—shall I say, overconfident—that, if they use AI, they'll still get all the benefits,' Koning said. The onus of changing who feels comfortable accessing AI falls not on the women workers, but on leaders in the workplace, Koning said. In many workplaces, workers, usually men, experiment with AI tools in the shadows. Even if an office doesn't have a license for or partnership with an AI company, its management should still set clear expectations and resources on how to use the technology, Koning suggested. 'If we want to make sure it's inclusive, it includes all workers, it's the job of a leader to bring everybody in,' he said. This story was originally featured on
