In this talk, I will present ongoing research on the intersection of human and AI perspectives in occupational evaluation. In the first part, I will showcase an analysis of the occupational prestige and social value perceptions across 76 digital economy occupations (e.g., app-based ride-hail driver, social media travel influencer, machine learning programmer, data protection officer, chatbot conversation trainer) in the United Kingdom, drawing from expansive surveys with over 2400 respondents. Our findings show that these emerging occupations are often viewed with modest prestige and perceived to have lower social value compared to traditional roles, but with important nuance across occupational groups. In the second part, I will discuss a comparison between human occupational evaluations and those generated by GPT-4 across the full occupation list of 576 occupation titles and four non-occupational roles. Despite a high correlation in evaluations of prestige and social value between humans and GPT-4, significant discrepancies exist, particularly in emerging digital jobs, which GPT-4 overestimates, and in stigmatized or illicit jobs, which GPT-4 underestimates. At the end, I will reflect on the opportunities and challenges of integrating AI assessments in social science research and conclude with potential policy implications.
Christoph Lutz (Dr. oec., University of St. Gallen, Switzerland) is a professor in the Department of Communication and Culture, BI Norwegian Business School (Oslo, Norway). He is also the co-director of the Nordic of Internet and Society, a leading Internet and Society research center in Europe. His research interests include digital inequality, social media, privacy, the sharing and gig economy, social robots, and social implications of AI. Christoph has published widely on these topics in top-tier journals such as New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems, Big Data & Society, the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), and Science and Engineering Ethics.
Zoom: https://uio.zoom.us/j/64228559152?pwd=eXJVWWV5VnJYR1NRYnRrTjlMbkQ5dz09