The US jobs market has yet to experience serious disruption from breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, according to an academic study.

Analysis by Yale University’s Budget Lab found there had been no “discernible disruption” since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022.

Researchers said its conclusion was not surprising because historical trends pointed to technological upheaval in workforces taking place over decades rather than months or years.

“Computers didn’t become commonplace in offices until nearly a decade after their release to the public, and it took even longer for them to transform office workflows,” said the study. “Even if new AI technologies will go on to impact the labor market as much, or more, dramatically, it is reasonable to expect that widespread effects will take longer than 33 months to materialise.”

The study said changes in the occupational mix in the US – a measure of what sort of jobs people do in the world’s biggest economy and whether fewer people are in certain types of occupations – were well under way during 2021 and more recent changes did not seem any more pronounced.

It added that the changes were “sluggish” compared with the 1940s and 50s when the jobs market underwent upheaval related to the second world war and other seismic events.

A key concern about the rise of generative artificial intelligence is that it will lead to AI tools taking over tasks carried out by humans in certain sectors, effectively making their jobs redundant and triggering widespread job losses. In May, the chief executive of the AI company Anthropic, Dario Amodei, warned that the technology could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs in the next five years.

Sectors most likely to be affected by tools such as ChatGPT includee newspapers, film-making and business services like accountancy. These were already showing changes in occupational mix before the release of the groundbreaking chatbot, said the report.

The analysis by economists at the Budget Lab and the Brookings Institute, a thinktank, said the US jobs mix indicated there was “no substantial acceleration in the rate of change in the composition of the labour market since the introduction of ChatGPT”.

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However, the report flagged some recent data that showed a divergence between the jobs mix for recent graduates and older graduates aged 25-34. It said the data could show AI impacting employment for early career workers but could also reflect a slowing jobs market.

“While anxiety over the effects of AI on today’s labour market is widespread, our data suggests it remains largely speculative,” said the report. “The picture of AI’s impact on the llabour market that emerges from our data is one that largely reflects stability, not major disruption at an economy-wide level.”