In the general population, there would be a very satisfying schadenfreude in watching the techies make themselves unemployed by their own hubris. I think that's part of the desire for the story to be true.
The other part is that those selling AI want to believe it is as big as the introduction of the internet, and not just another hype train like blockchain.
Any evidence that makes the current hotness seem like a tectonic shift is attractive to those types.
As a developer I've tried to use Copilot and ChatGPT as much as I can to improve my performance, but even with GPT4 I've found that for my workflow the most of the leverage it gives falls into:
* Scaffolding of projects like unit tests or basic wireframes,
* writing or proofreading e-mail
* understanding cryptic legacy code that uses old practices
* saving me having to visit some framework documentation.
But I found it hard to believe it's the reason behind layoffs, as the ceiling of their capabilities it's pretty low when things get complex, and even in some cases can have diminishing or negative returns. Examples of this are hallucinations of APIs or code that is not compatible with the language I'm using. So it becomes like a slot machine, hoping that the next prompt will have a good result.
I think the main advantage of the current iteration of AI, it's like having the old Google back, before SEO and paid articles contaminated the web with useless first results.
It would be difficult to prove that AI as a tool is the direct cause of differences in the job market. It would be equally difficult to prove that interest rates are directly responsible for the same differences.
Both the above comment and the article are making claims about a system that is complex enough that it would be difficult to prove any causal link.
That said, I believe that interest rates are probably a much greater factor in any net decrease on tech jobs than the proliferation of LLMs (which is really what has changed).
That and how the IRS changed the rules for tax purposes. You can't write an engineers salary off in the same year it was paid but rather over 4 years now.