The AI That Didn’t Take Your Job

May 9

Written By Michele Edington (formerly Michele Gargiulo)

I was bracing for the future.

When ChatGPT hit the scene, it didn’t just walk in, it crashed through the glass ceiling of possibility and flooded our feeds. Articles shouted from the digital rooftops: “AI will kill your job!” “Say goodbye to the 9-to-5!” “The robots are here, and they want your coffee mug, 401K, and salary!”

But now, a year and change into the AI revolution, something curious has happened.

Absolutely nothing.

Not nothing in the grand sense, because AI is everywhere (and people still don’t shut up about it). It’s helping you write that awkward email, or brainstorming your podcast title (it’s pretty good at creating names I think!), it’s drafting legal memos and debugging code and summarizing long-winded Slack threads. But despite all that digital humming and buzzing here and there, the labor market hasn’t cracked.

A new study just dropped, and it says the quiet part out loud: AI isn’t changing salaries or working hours, not yet anyway.

The Study That Caught Everyone Off Guard

Economists surveyed over 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces across 11 AI-exposed occupations. These weren't fringe jobs, they were the real deal: marketing, software development, teaching, law, customer service. Places where chatbots and large language models like ChatGPT are supposedly shaking things up.

But when the dust settled and the numbers were tallied, the results were underwhelming in the most interesting way.

No significant change in salaries, working hours, or even job responsibilities. Even in companies that were “all-in on AI,” there was barely a ripple.

So, what’s the deal?

The Ghost in the Machine

We all love a good narrative (or you wouldn’t be here reading this). AI was supposed to be the next Industrial Revolution, the internet on steroids and like those Olympic ones, a second coming of electricity, but in practice, it’s been more like switching from a bike to an electric scooter. Helpful, yeah sure. Life-altering, eh, not really.

The thing is, AI hasn’t been replacing jobs, it’s just been shadowing them. Watching, learning, showing some suggestions from the side rather than storming the front desk and pushing the secretary over.

Companies aren’t firing humans en masse, they’re just using AI to speed things up, reduce bottlenecks, or handle repetitive tasks that the people didn’t want to do anyway. It’s the equivalent of having an intern or a ghostwriter in the room…only the ghost is painfully literal and trained on terabytes of the internet.

I wrote previously about AI decoding chicken speech, so it’s clearly getting smarter in some senses, but being smart isn’t the same as replacing flesh-and-blood workers who bring empathy, humor, creativity, and contradiction to the table.

And that’s the contradiction AI still hasn’t cracked.

Why the Tectonic Shift Hasn’t Hit Yet

There are a few possible reasons the world of work looks eerily similar, despite the chatbot in everyone’s pocket.

1. Tech adoption ≠ tech transformation

Companies may be using AI tools, but that doesn’t mean they’ve restructured to accommodate them. Having ChatGPT open in a tab doesn’t automatically turn your company into a Jetsons-style utopia.

2. Humans are still essential in high-trust tasks

Sure, a bot can summarize a meeting. But do you trust it to tell your boss you’re quitting? To draft your company’s crisis response or to create a marketing campaign that makes people feel something?

We still want a real person steering the wheel in most of our tasks.

3. Managers haven’t redistributed the gains

Even if AI saves someone an hour a day, it doesn’t mean they get to go home earlier or get a raise. Often, that time just gets absorbed into more work. More emails, more meetings, more white noise we wish we could filter out.

The structure remains the same as it always was, the silence between tasks just gets filled faster.

The Jobs AI Hasn't, and Might Never, Replace

One of the more poetic ironies of this whole situation is that the roles most exposed to AI are also the ones best protected by creativity.

A lawyer who uses GPT to summarize case law still needs to argue with nuance and double check their work thanks to hallucinations. A teacher who gets lesson ideas from a bot still needs to read a room full of squirmy, chaotic humans. A writer (hi, it’s me!) might use AI to brainstorm (I’ve tried this several times, but it just repeats similar ideas over and over again and sort of makes up things that don’t help), but the final touch: the voice, the weirdness, the soul, that's still human territory.

If anything, it seems more and more like AI is actually creating jobs. More electricians than ever are needed to fuel the rise of the machines, and people are even being trained to decode the machines as they talk to each other.

Maybe AI isn’t the end of the worker, it’s just the beginning of the augmented worker on steroids, someone who rides into the meeting with a smart ghost on their shoulder.

So… What Now?

If you were anxiously watching the AI horizon, wondering if your job would be next…breathe.

You’re probably safe. The internet says it’s “for now”, but I have a hard time believing it’s not forever.

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore what’s coming. AI might not be taking jobs, but it’s definitely changing how they’re done. The people who thrive in this new world are the ones who lean into the weirdness, they might let AI sketch the outline while they paint in color.

They don’t see AI as a threat, they see it as a very enthusiastic, occasionally chaotic intern who works for free and never sleeps.

Use it wisely, it’s not your replacement, but it can be your megaphone.

I mentioned how I tried to use it to help with my blog at first. It ended up being a complete disaster in the worst way. It edited everything so polished that my hard-written posts started reading 8/10 AI generated when I ran them through Grok. I spent months going back and undoing all the stupid AI polish it put on everything. It also hallucinated a ton of sources that took me a moment to realize they weren’t even real studies!
Now, obviously I got rid of it for blogging in the traditional sense after that, but I do use it to analyze my metrics and statistics, which it seems to be really good at. Grok even told me I should add a search bar at the bottom of my blog page for easy searching.
Helpful, but not a replacement for me.

A Quiet Revolution

This isn’t the AI tidal wave we were told to fear. There are no pink slips raining from the sky, no robot bosses pacing office corridors, instead, it’s been more like a gentle nudge here or there.

It slips in, helps out, and waits for us to come back with another question.

The AI revolution didn’t break the world of work, instead, it just joined in quietly.