Public debate links worsening job prospects for AI-exposed occupations to the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Using monthly U.S. unemployment insurance records, we measure occupation- and location-specific unemployment risk and find that risk rose in AI-exposed occupations beginning in early 2022, months before ChatGPT. Analyzing millions of LinkedIn profiles, we show that graduate cohorts from 2021 onward entered AI-exposed jobs at lower rates than earlier cohorts, with gaps opening before late 2022. Finally, from millions of university syllabi, we find that graduates taking more AI-exposed curricula had higher first-job pay and shorter job searches after ChatGPT. Together, these results point to forces pre-dating generative AI and to the ongoing value of LLM-relevant education.
@article{arxiv.2601.02554,
title = {AI-exposed jobs deteriorated before ChatGPT},
author = {Morgan R. Frank and Alireza Javadian Sabet and Lisa Simon and Sarah H. Bana and Renzhe Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.02554},
year = {2026}
}