Many employees, especially those working in the creative industries, are understandably concerned about the prospect of AI stealing their jobs – and new research has found that this may not be an unfounded fear.
A report from Imperial College Business School, Harvard Business School and the German Institute for Economic Research shows that demand for digital freelancers in writing and coding has declined by 21% since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
Automation-sensitive fields such as writing, software and app development saw a 21% decline in job openings, while data entry and social media post-production saw a 13% decline. Image generation functions, including graphic design and 3D modeling, fell by 17%. Google search trends confirmed a larger decline in industries that are aware of and using generative AI.
Gloomy labor market
The studytitled “Who is AI Replacing? The Impact of Generative AI on Online Freelancing Platforms”, analyzed nearly two million job openings in 61 countries between July 2021 and July 2023. It categorized jobs into positions prone to automation, manual work and image generation. , and found significant drops in messages in these sectors after 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 had a huge impact on the workplace. While many organizations may move from freelancers to generative AI, it remains to be seen whether organizations are satisfied with the quality of work AI provides compared to freelancers, and whether this trend will continue.”
It’s not all bad news, however. “While our research findings suggest the job market looks bleak, new ones will continue to emerge as technology pushes aside professions. For freelancers, this means these people are adapting their skills to the changing landscape and will continue to secure work in the future.” , she decided.
What can you do to protect yourself?
There’s no doubt that the threat to digital freelancers is real and will grow as ChatGPT and other AI tools improve. The future may look bleak, but as Dr. Xinrong Zhu says, it is not entirely hopeless. You can protect yourself from the challenges of AI 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, embracing AI tools to increase productivity and the quality of your work can turn potential threats into benefits. AI is not going away, so we will all have to learn and work with it.
Building a personal brand and extensive networking are also critical, as these can lead to opportunities that purely AI-driven services cannot compete with. It is also important to remember that ChatGPT will rarely produce precisely what a company is looking for. The images created by this may have flaws, one finger too many on one hand, or bizarre errors, and an article may contain content that is simply not true. Code written by AI can introduce logic and syntax errors, efficiency issues, and even security issues, all of which can prove costly in the long run.