New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, analyzing nearly 490,000 corporate earnings calls, confirms what official data has been showing for three years: Artificial intelligence has not yet produced a measurable bump in aggregate productivity. But one of the paper’s authors offered a more disquieting possibility—that AI may already be generating real gains that are structurally invisible, because AI itself is destroying the value of what it has made abundant.
The mechanism is simple. When AI makes some output radically cheaper to produce, that output simultaneously becomes less valuable, and the productivity math cancels itself: Gains in one column get erased by falling prices in another. Anyone can now generate marketing materials, animations, even a passable news story with a keystroke. But if everyone can, none of it commands what it used to. The task got easier; the output got cheaper. Somewhere in that trade, a real gain disappeared from the statistics without ever showing up as a loss.
