GDP is total value of products and services created. If you make the same amount of same things without workers, your GDP stays the same.
AI would increase GDP only if you can sell more of your products because of AI. But finding customers is much harder than automating work.
Maybe, but that isn’t what seems to be going on with AI.
We don’t get the same “news” publication with AI and zero workers. We get a crappy news publication with one worker and AIs cranking out the same volume of articles as 14 workers, but the articles themselves are crap. They manage to get some level of readership and sell roughly the same ad volume per readership level as a “real” news publication. In theory that should show up on GDP because it is a bunch of revenue from ads that didn’t exist before, or maybe that one person would have been 14th of the personal of another publication, so it should look like that one person is 14x more productive.
We get AI in our watch telling us we should see our doctors because we “might” have hypertension. If we do actually see our doctors when we wouldn't have otherwise done so, GDP gets a little boost, one more doctor’s vist! Or it doesn’t get a boost if we move it up 3 months sooner. If we do actually have hypertension and would not otherwise have spotted it before a heart attack and death maybe that has another GDP boost, all the productivity of a person who otherwise would have died.
We also get AI generated hog butchering schemes and mass customized SPAM that slips past traditional SPAM filters. AI seems to be a big friend to scammers, or a big tool of scammers. I don’t know if it is boosting scammers productivity, but assuming it does, how does that get measured in GDP? More fraud moves money from people’s life savings into fraudsters accounts where presumably they spend it in part laundering it into ligitimate seeming income and then buy some luxury goods, or maybe sustenance goods. The people who got defrauded now need to work extra hard to build up a new retirement savings? Do they? Maybe this is an untapped statistic! A major source of GDP growth! We should defraud some people for science! For the dismal science in particular!