> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933
> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.
Again, none of this, especially the calculation about economic output, indicates that the new work it generated led offset the time it saved.
If people save an hour a week and use that to browse HackerNews, they've saved time but haven't produced any economic value, but it doesn't mean they didn't save time.