OpenAI and Upwork find AI is reshaping what clients hire freelancers to do, not just replacing them
Work at the Frontier: AI's effect on freelance work
OpenAI and Upwork compared ChatGPT usage with Upwork job postings and found that AI-related projects now span a 45% more diverse mix of tasks, combine skills in unfamiliar ways, and carry larger fixed-price budgets and more hours. Of 63 work categories, 43 saw tasks common in ChatGPT lose share on Upwork. The researchers say the data doesn't support a simple substitution story.
The findings do not point to a simple substitution story.
- aavci
From what I read about the freelancers’ perspective, a lot of the newer gigs they get are to clean up work already done by AI instead of the opportunity to start new like they did in the past.
- eatonphil
I pay an illustrator for every illustration on The Consensus, and paid a graphic designer for the logo after doing a first version myself. AI artwork, let alone AI writing, is just not great for your image.
You can find an illustrator anywhere in the world for the budget you'd like to spend (The Consensus is bootstrapped, a shoe-string budget). Would love to stop seeing tech companies using AI illustrations.
- civicsquid
It sounds like they're mainly saying that there are certain categories of work in which people use AI to handle things themselves (directly via ChatGPT) and other categories for which they still post a freelance listing (especially if it requires skills across multiple domains).
Writing, illustration, and tech support seem to be the categories people handle themselves most often via AI, according to the first graphic... But then the second graphic suggests that the number of freelance postings for a top 'do-it-yourself-with-AI' category like writing is only down about 0.5% year over year. That almost suggests there isn't really an effect. Even the largest-changing category in that graphic, web development, is down only about 2%.
I think I conceptually can agree with their implication that AI allows freelancers to take on more breadth on their own, but the data/graphics they're presenting are confusing me. I'm not sure I get it.