Does Artificial Intelligence Reduce Cosmopolitanism? Evidence from ChatGPT

• In Event: Workers, Robots, and International Political Economics

Abstract

Scholars have established a connection between automation and the backlash against globalization, however these explorations have focused mostly on the role of robot adoption. We exploit a major shock, the advent of ChatGPT, to extend our understanding of this connection in regards to the impact of Artificial Intelligence. We collect data on a wide variety of opinion survey data sets to estimate the impact of the announcement of ChatGPT on people’s attitudes towards cosmopolitanism - understood as displaying support for equality of opportunity regardless of citizenship status or other socio-economic affiliations. We find that the announcement of ChatGPT has stronger impacts on the attitudes of skilled labor, increasing their support for redistribution but reducing their support for cosmopolitanism. We show that these findings are consistent with a model of redistributive conflict wherein automation is deskilling, replacing the tasks of skilled workers, in contrast to extant models wherein automation substitutes unskilled labor. We show that these effects are driven by increased concerns about individual economic prospects. We also perform numerous placebo tests and robustness tests to show that it is the advent of ChatGPT and no other events, what explains our findings.

Author

• Carlos Felipe Balcazar, New York University