Artificial intelligence replacing jobs isn’t a theoretical idea, new research suggests, but something that’s happening right now.
Henley Wing Chiu, a Queens, New York-based researcher at the job and hiring trends website Bloomberry, looked at five million data points to see which jobs AI is most likely to replace and which ones are already in the process of being replaced.
Chiu, who is also a co-founder of content marketing platform BuzzSumo, took the 12 most popular freelance job categories on Upwork, a freelance hub, and tracked how posts changed from 30 days before ChatGPT’s public debut in February 2024.
It found that most job categories showed an increase in the number of ads, with three notable exceptions: writing, translation and customer service.
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Writing jobs were down 33%, translation jobs were down 19%, and customer service jobs were down 16%, all from November 1, 2022, to February 14, 2024.
“I definitely expected a decline in write jobs, as this is perhaps ChatGPT’s most popular use case, and this was reflected in the -33% decrease in write jobs,” Chiu wrote.
He explained that the decline in customer service jobs wasn’t surprising either due to the rise of AI-powered customer service chatbots.
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Nearly every other category saw an increase in job postings, with video editing/production jobs up 39%. Freelance graphic design, web design, accounting, sales and web development jobs have also increased.
Chiu said in the report that he decided to analyze freelance jobs instead of full-time or part-time jobs because the freelance market was the one most likely to see the impact of AI first.
He offered some explanations about the data: Generative AI tools may be good enough now to replace writing tasks, but not yet up to quality results in tasks like image or video generation. However, that may change as OpenAI recently announced its Sora text-to-video AI generator.
Another explanation could be that users have not yet understood how to fully utilize AI tools.
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A 2023 Upwork survey showed that freelancers make up 38% of the U.S. workforce and are 2.2 times more likely to regularly use generative AI than other professionals for tasks like research, brainstorming, and programming.