If you're struggling to sort the AI hype from reality, you're not alone. The seemingly breakneck pace of AI development makes it tough to sort headlines from fantasy, with a constant flood of new products and incremental improvements to old ones combining into a rhetorical mess.Arguably the main economic risk of developing artificial intelligence — or its biggest draw, if you're a business owner trying to pad your bottom line — is the prospect of automating jobs.Whether or not AI is currently taking a meaningful number of people's jobs, though, has been exceedingly difficult to nail down. On the one hand, the US job market has taken a nosedive in recent months and the "laptop workers" most vulnerable to AI seem to be getting hit especially hard.On the other hand, even the most advanced AI still struggles to perform alongside humans, let alone replace them. A recent MIT study found that AI initiatives are failing to deliver expected revenue returns at 95 percent the companies that roll them out.But while there's plenty of reason to doubt the AI industry's extravagant claims, there's also reason to worry that the tech is already eating into the labor market.For instance, a recent survey of AI and labor data by a team of researchers at Stanford's Digital Economy Lab uncovered some of the first comprehensive evidence that the AI industry really is throwing the job market into flux.The scholars compiled three years of payroll records on millions of US workers at tens of thousands of businesses, allowing them to identify long-term trends according to jobs and age groups.Their first finding was a dramatic decline in employment for entry-level knowledge workers aged 22 to 25 years old, whose occupations are at the highest theoretical risk for automation — a metric called "AI exposure." These are workers in office gigs whose day-to-day tasks have a lot of crossover with AI functions, like software engineers, service workers, and marketing professionals.By comparison, older workers in those fields saw their headcount either stagnate or increase slightly.But what gives the study some extra bite is its observation of 22 to 25 year olds in non-AI-exposed job fields — like industrial workers, nurses, or retail supervisors — who saw their headcounts grow over the past few years."[We] find these broad trends not limited to just case studies," said Bharat Chandar, one of the authors of the paper. "For 22 to 25 year olds, employment is falling in the most AI-exposed jobs and rising in the least exposed jobs. For older workers, [we] find small differences in employment trends based on AI exposure."That divergence is ominous. It suggests that AI may actually be cutting into early-career roles that traditionally served as a training ground for longer-term careers. What it would mean if those onramps are getting destroyed could have economic repercussions for decades.At the same time, exactly why AI seems to be impacting the job market is a whole other can of worms.For one thing, previous data has shown that AI tends to be used by CEOs and business executives as cover to reduce headcounts or outsource jobs — cost cutting measures they might have taken anyway after the post-pandemic hiring boom, even without the AI salesmen knocking at their door.There's also the wrinkle that the job market was already crappy for entry-level workers before AI chatbots hit the market — meaning it didn't take much for a few AI exposed jobs to start dragging averages down."Overall, [the] job market for entry-level workers has been stagnant since late 2022, while market for experienced workers remains robust," Chandar continued. "Stagnation for young workers [was] driven by declines in AI-exposed jobs. Of course, lots of changes in the economy, so this is not all caused by AI."Perhaps most notably, the researchers also observed that wages across all ages and compensation have been stagnant since 2022. Unlike entry-level job numbers, this stat is nothing new — an indication that, whatever jobs AI is or isn't taking, the money saved isn't trickling down to the workers, but being hoarded by those at the top.More on AI: CEO Boasts That He Laid Off 80 Percent of His Staff Because They Didn't Love AI Enough, Threatens to Do It AgainThe post New Paper Finds Evidence That AI Is Already Killing the Job Market appeared first on Futurism.