The researcher said in the report that freelance jobs were analyzed first because that market will likely see AI’s immediate impact.
Key Takeaways
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Labor market trend website Bloomberry looked at more than five million freelancing jobs listed on Upwork, a freelancing website.
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The report found that the number of writing, translation, and customer service freelance jobs have declined the most since ChatGPT became mainstream.
AI replacing jobs isn’t a theoretical idea, new research suggests, but something that is happening — right now.
Henley Wing Chiu, a Queens, New York-based researcher at labor and hiring trend website Bloomberry, looked at five million data points to see which jobs AI is most likely to replace, and which jobs are already being replaced.
Chiu, who is also co-founder of content marketing platform BuzzSumo, took the 12 most popular freelancing job categories on Upwork, a freelancing hub, and tracked how postings changed from 30 days before ChatGPT’s public debut to February 2024.
He found that most job categories showed an increase in the number of postings, with three notable exceptions: writing, translation, and customer service.
Writing jobs declined by 33%, translation jobs declined by 19%, and customer service jobs declined by 16%, all from November 1, 2022, to February 14, 2024.
“I definitely expected writing jobs to decrease, as this is perhaps the most popular use case of ChatGPT, and that was reflected in the -33% decrease in writing jobs,” Chiu wrote.
He elaborated that the decline in customer service jobs wasn’t surprising either because of the rise of AI customer service chatbots.
BY SHERIN SHIBU
