Stanford University’s campus is seen from above on Dec. 11, 2024.

You’ve heard the anecdotes about how artificial intelligence is displacing jobs. A San Francisco AI startup’s billboards blare: “Stop hiring humans.” Industrious members of Generation Z head to the trades. Graduates from colleges like UC Berkeley and Stanford struggle to find their first full-time roles. 

The tales intrigued Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, where questions about AI and work are top of mind. “The plural of anecdote is data,” he quipped to SFGATE. “So we wanted to get a bunch of data and see what the answer is.”

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In a paper released Tuesday, Brynjolfsson and two other Stanford researchers gave the AI and work discourse some much-needed clarity. Using a massive and recent trove of data, they showed that 22- to 25-year-olds in fields that are particularly exposed to AI are, indeed, having a harder time getting work than........

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