AI Doesn’t Kill Jobs? Tell That to Freelancers
Data shows that AI has indeed replaced many freelance jobs. However, among freelancers, some earn less than half of what they did in normal years, while others have seen their incomes increase by 40%.
Jennifer Kelly, a freelance writer, lives in the picturesque New England town of Walpole, New Hampshire. Now, she feels sorry for young people who want to follow in her footsteps.
Not long after OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene, the financial advisors who’d relied on her 30 years of wealth—management writing experience stopped calling. And no new clients stepped in to replace them. Her income dried up almost completely.
When she asked about it, the clients who’d left insisted they weren’t using artificial intelligence (AI). But a few months later, some clients came back with an odd request. They sheepishly admitted that the copy generated by AI wasn’t great — could she spruce it up?
“This isn’t fixing,” she said of the generic drivel AI churns out. “You’ve gotta rewrite it.”
Kelly’s story is unique, tied to her skills and situation, yet it’s a snapshot of what freelancers across the US and around the world are going through.
It might also be an early sign of how AI will replace other types of jobs. Most jobs are a mix of different tasks, so AI’s ability to handle these tasks is the ultimate gauge of future job security.
There’s good reason to think her story mirrors that of tens of thousands, maybe even millions. In the past year, at least six studies using data from freelance job—info platforms have been published, each building on the last. Confidential data from at least one such platform backs up the research findings.
Considering ChatGPT has been around for less than two years, the pace of these studies is mind-boggling. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content — licensing deal with OpenAI.
Kelly Monahan, managing director of the research institute at job—info platform Upwork, says freelance jobs on Upwork that require basic writing, programming, or translation skills are vanishing.
Her findings jibe with those of over a dozen researchers from places like Harvard Business School, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Hong Kong. They’ve found that since ChatGPT and other generative AI models arrived, the number of freelance jobs in generative—friendly areas posted on Upwork, Fiverr, and related platforms has plunged by as much as 21%. Meanwhile, businesses related to AI agents, large language model training, etc. have skyrocketed!
Economists like to say that AI will automate some job tasks, but many jobs won’t be fully replaced by AI. That’s because most jobs have a much broader scope and higher requirements than the parts that can be handed over to AI.
But freelancers are an ever—growing slice of the workforce: An Upwork study found that 38% of Americans were doing some form of freelance work in 2022. For these jobs, sometimes most of a person’s work consists of tasks that can be automated — and that can put their entire livelihood at risk.
Reid Southen is a concept artist in the film and TV industry. You’ve probably heard of some of the shows and movies he’s worked on, like Blue Beetle and Matrix Resurrections. He says that in 2023, his income was less than half of what it was in normal years, and it was even worse than in 2020 when the entire film and TV industry was effectively shut down.
Get OpenTaskAI’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Southen’s work usually happens in the early stages of a project, when producers need detailed sketches to figure out how a movie or show will look. As the industry has slowed and producers are cutting costs, this behind—the—scenes work is being replaced by AI faster than any other job in the industry. A big chunk of it is being farmed out to the AI image generator Midjourney, which by the end of 2022 could churn out realistic images from just short text prompts. Southern says that even when concept artists are brought in, it’s often to tweak images that AI has already made.
His industry peers have had similar experiences, voicing similar views on social media and in private artist—to—artist chats.
“Right now, talk to any artist, and they’ll tell you how they’ve been asked to work off AI — AI-generated stuff or how they’ve lost their jobs,” Southen says.
Besides fewer projects, film and TV studios and production companies are also cutting the time they hire artists. Southen says projects that used to last three to six months can now wrap up in a few weeks, and the pay is often way below normal. Recently, he got a job where the proposal was already full of AI-generated art. The producer wanted more but offered him only half the normal rate.
As in other periods when automation took off quickly, some are profiting from the shift. An Upwork spokesperson says freelancers who are more productive with AI but whose jobs can’t be replaced by it, like those in data science and IT, have seen their earnings rise by an average of 40%.
Plus, some freelancers report a spike in demand for their work. That’s because, at least for the more specialized and demanding work they do, AI doesn’t perform as well as all the hype suggests.
Shortly after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, David Erik Nelson, a freelance sales and marketing copywriter in Ann Arbor, Michigan, saw a flood of business inquiries.
“New clients came to me, griping that their previous providers had been feeding them AI-generated content without coming clean,” Nelson says. AI-generated sales materials were grammatically okay but super-generic and full of errors, and couldn’t convince people to shell out six or seven figures for a product.
“Marketers thought the stuff looked passable,” Nelson says. “But when you show it to someone who really knows, they’ll say ‘It’s a word salad’.”
Monahan, the Upwork researcher, says that in some ways, AI’s impact on freelancers is old hat, just like the impact of technology. She adds that routine, low—skill tasks that can be fully automated mean lower pay for freelancers who used to do them.
Kelly, the New Hampshire copywriter, is glad she’s 62. She won’t have to put up with being grilled about why she’s not using AI to speed up work or being asked to clean up AI-generated junk for much longer. “We’re good — our mortgage is paid off, and I’ll get Social Security,” she says.
Still, she’s steamed that human writing is being replaced by AI-generated “junk.” AI-generated content might still show up in Google search rankings, but she’s seen so much of it that she can spot it in a heartbeat.
“When I see something that reads like it’s AI—written, I just close it,” she adds. “The Internet’s getting boring.”
What we need is content that really tugs at the heartstrings, not a cold word salad! AI can boost efficiency, but it still needs human smarts to really deliver!
