The Jobs Most Exposed to ChatGPT

Accountants are among the professionals whose careers are most exposed to the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence, according to a new study. The researchers found that at least half of accounting tasks could be completed much faster with the technology.

The same was true for mathematicians, interpreters, writers and nearly 20% of the U.S. workforce, according to the study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI, the company that makes the popular AI tool ChatGPT.

The tool has provoked excitement and anxiety in companies, schools, governments and the general public for its ability to process massive amounts of information and generate sophisticated—though not necessarily accurate or unbiased—content in response to prompts from users.

The researchers, who published their working paper online this month, examined occupations’ exposure to the new technology, which is powered by software called large language models that can analyse and generate text. They analysed the share of a job’s tasks where GPTs—generative pre-trained transformers—and software that incorporates them can reduce the time it takes to complete a task by at least 50%. Research has found that state-of-the-art GPTs excel in tasks such as translation, classification, creative writing and generating computer code.

They found that most jobs will be changed in some form by GPTs, with 80% of workers in occupations where at least one job task can be performed more quickly by generative AI. Information-processing roles—including public relations specialists, court reporters and blockchain engineers—are highly exposed, they found. The jobs that will be least affected by the technology include short-order cooks, motorcycle mechanics and oil-and-gas roustabouts.

To reach their conclusions, the authors used a government database of occupations and their associated activities and tasks, and had both people and artificial intelligence models assign exposure levels to the activities and tasks.

The researchers didn’t predict whether jobs will be lost or whose jobs will be lost, said Matt Beane, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies the impact of technology on the labor market and wasn’t involved in the study.

“Exposure predicts nothing in terms of what will change and how fast it will change,” he said. “Human beings reject change that compromises their interests” and the process of implementing new technologies is often fraught with negotiation, resistance, “terror and hope,” he said.

The real challenge, Mr. Beane said, is for companies, schools and policy makers to help people adapt. “That’s a multi-trillion dollar problem,” he said, and can include, among other things, training workers to collaborate effectively with the technology and redesigning jobs to enhance the autonomy, wages and career prospects of many roles.

Individuals have already begun using generative AI to work more quickly, though many employers worry about security and accuracy.

Michael Quash, a 32-year-old Richmond, Va.-based broadcast engineer, said he has found greater efficiency when he uses ChatGPT for monotonous tasks or to work through complex coding problems. “ChatGPT can be a force multiplier,” he said.

His employer, Audacy Inc., said it is letting employees experiment with the tool. “Like many media companies, we believe that there is value in ChatGPT for certain processes,” said Sarah Foss, Audacy’s chief technology officer.

Other recent studies have also found that generative AI can save significant time and produce better results than humans can. In a Massachusetts Institute of Technology experiment focused on college-educated professionals, researchers divided 444 grant writers, marketers, consultants, human-resources professionals and other workers in half. Both groups were asked to complete short written tasks, and one group could use ChatGPT to do so.

Those with access to ChatGPT finished their tasks 10 minutes faster. And outside readers who assessed the quality of these assignments said the AI-assisted workers did better than the other group, according to the study, which was released in March and hasn’t been peer-reviewed.

Another paper published last week by researchers at Microsoft Corp., which is investing billions into OpenAI, analysed the capabilities of GPT-4, the latest version of OpenAI’s tool, and found that it could solve “novel and difficult tasks” with “human-level performance” in fields such as mathematics, coding, medicine, law and psychology.

Amanda Richardson, chief executive of the technical interview platform CoderPad, said she’s used ChatGPT to write slides when she presents about her field. The tool creates a basic outline, and from there she tracks down specific details to make a more compelling presentation, she said.

CoderPad’s customers are businesses looking to hire. They ask job candidates to demonstrate their technical skills using CoderPad, and Ms. Richardson has recommended that customers explicitly make ChatGPT part of their interview process: Ask applicants to use ChatGPT to solve a problem, and then have them critique the answer it spits out. Does the code have any security vulnerabilities? Is it scalable? What’s good or bad?

“It leans into embracing developer efficiency,” she said.

David Beckham was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday with Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan to promote their new partnership. But all anyone wanted to talk about was his son.

After the obligatory questions about business and the World Cup, a host on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” lobbed Beckham an out-of-left-field query about how young people can preserve their mental health in the age of social media.

“Children are allowed to make mistakes,” Beckham, 50, said. “That’s how they learn. So, that’s what I try to teach my kids, but you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.”

Just a day earlier, his 26-year-old son Brooklyn Beckham had posted a series of accusations about his soccer-famous father and pop-star-turned-fashion-designer mother, Victoria Beckham.

He said that his parents had controlled him for years, lied about him to the press and sought to damage his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham. Their goal, he said, was to affect the image of a “perfect family.”

“My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote on Instagram. “Brand Beckham comes first.”

That brand has been burnished over decades of professional triumphs, tabloid scandals and slick dealmaking.

Recently, both David and Victoria Beckham put their legacies on-screen in docuseries that cast them as hardworking entrepreneurs and devoted parents. Their image appeared stronger than ever. Now their firstborn child is throwing stones.

Representatives for David Beckham, Victoria Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Nicola Peltz Beckham declined to comment.

In the U.K., the Beckhams are as close as you can get to royalty without sharing Windsor DNA. David is perhaps the most famous English player in soccer history, while Victoria parlayed her Spice Girls fame into a career as a respected fashion designer.

Their partnership was forged in the cauldron of 1990s celebrity gossip, with their every move—in their careers, their bumpy personal lives and their adventurous senses of personal style—subject to tabloid scrutiny.

“They were Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce,” said Elaine Lui, founder of the website Lainey Gossip.

Over time, the couple became savvy managers of their own brand, a sprawling modern empire including a professional soccer team, fashion and beauty lines, investment deals and commercial partnerships.

In recent years they each released a Netflix docuseries—“Beckham” in 2023, “Victoria Beckham” in 2025—featuring scenes from their private family life. (Brooklyn and Nicola appeared in David’s series, but not Victoria’s.)

“The way they’ve performed their celebrity has been togetherness,” Lui said: Appearing and engaging with the world as a happily married couple, in both relative calm and amid scandal. And as their family grew, their four children became smiling ambassadors for Brand Beckham, too.

Until Monday night. In a series of Instagram Story posts, Brooklyn accused his parents of “trying endlessly to ruin” his marriage to Nicola, an actress and model, and the daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz . Brooklyn declared, “I do not want to reconcile with my family.”

Where Victoria and David seemed to see press scrutiny as part of the job, Brooklyn and Nicola are operating in a manner more typical of their own generation. Brooklyn’s posts call to mind the “no contact” boundaries some children have enforced with their parents in recent years to much pop-psych chatter.

Andrew Friedman, managing director of crisis communications at Orchestra, said he’d advised many clients through family drama. “Going public,” he said, should be a “last resort.”

He’s also warned clients that using social media to air grievances opens a can of worms. “Nuance is not welcome in social-media feeding frenzies,” Friedman said. “Sensational and unusual details will overshadow the central issue.”

Brooklyn, the eldest of the Beckhams’ four children, has built a following in his parents’ image, though without the benefit (or burden) of a steady career.

He’s worked as a model, photographer, cooking-show host and most recently founded a hot-sauce brand. Brooklyn and Nicola went public with their relationship in 2020 and married in a lavish 2022 ceremony at her family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

Rumors of a family feud flared almost immediately after the wedding, including whispers about the fact that Nicola didn’t wear a dress made by her fashion-designer mother-in-law.

Brooklyn on Monday recounted further grievances related to a mother-son dance and the seating chart. In the months and years that followed, celebrity journalists and fans closely tracked both generations of the family, looking for cracks in the relationship.

But official dispatches from Beckham World suggested that things were just fine. In a scene from the final episode of David’s Netflix series, the Beckham family, including Brooklyn and Nicola, joke around on a visit to their country home. It’s a picture of familial bliss.

“We’ve tried to give our children the most normal upbringing as possible. But you’ve got a dad that was England captain and a mom that was Posh Spice,” David says in voice-over.

“And they could be little s—s. And they’re not. And that’s why I say I’m so proud of my children, and I’m so in awe of my children, the way they’ve turned out.”

The Jobs Most Exposed to ChatGPT

New study finds that AI tools could more quickly handle at least half of the tasks that auditors, interpreters and writers do now

In a series of social-media posts, the eldest child of David and Victoria Beckham threw stones at the image of a ‘perfect family’.