Many employees, especially those working in creative fields, are understandably worried about the possibility of AI stealing their jobs, and new research has found that it may not be an unfounded fear.
A report from Imperial College Business School, Harvard Business School, and the German Institute for Economic Research found that demand for digital freelancers in writing and coding has decreased by 21% since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.
Automation-prone fields such as writing, software and app development saw a 21% decline in job postings, while data entry and social media post-production saw a 13% drop. Imaging roles, including graphic design and 3D modeling, fell 17%. Google search trends confirmed a further decline in sectors that know and use generative AI.
Bleak job market
The study, titled “Who is AI replacing? The impact of generative AI on online freelancing platforms,” analyzed nearly two million job postings in 61 countries between July 2021 and July 2023. It ranked jobs in roles prone to automation, manual work, and imaging and found significant declines in postings in these sectors following the launch of ChatGPT.
Dr Xinrong Zhu, co-author and assistant professor of marketing at Imperial College Business School, said: “Despite being available on the market for just over a year, ChatGPT has already made a huge impact on of work. While many organizations may be moving from freelancers to generative AI, it remains to be seen whether organizations are satisfied with the quality of work that AI delivers compared to freelancers, and whether this trend will continue.”
But it's not all bad news. “Although the results of our research suggest that the job market looks bleak, as long as technology sidelines professions, new ones will emerge. For freelancers, this means that those people adapt their skills to the changing landscape and will continue to get a job in the future,” he concluded.
What can you do to protect yourself?
There is no doubt that the threat to digital freelancers is real and will become more significant as ChatGPT and other AI tools improve. The future may seem bleak, but, as Dr. Xinrong Zhu says, it is not entirely hopeless. You can protect yourself from AI challenges by diversifying your skills and specializing in areas where human creativity and emotional intelligence are essential, such as strategic thinking, complex problem solving, and nuanced content creation. Furthermore, adopting AI tools to increase the productivity and quality of your work could turn potential threats into advantages. AI is not going away, so we will all have to learn with it and work alongside it.
Building a personal brand and in-depth networking are also crucial, as they can lead to opportunities that purely AI-powered services cannot compete with. It is also important to remember that ChatGPT will rarely produce exactly what a company is looking for. The images you create may have glitches, too many fingers, or strange glitches, and an article may include content that simply isn't true. Code written by AI can introduce logic and syntax errors, efficiency issues, and even security vulnerabilities, all of which can prove costly in the future.
