I've resisted writing about how AI will affect the job market because, frankly, I had no idea what to say. Since the explosion of generative AI tools on the scene, I've read reputable-sounding research saying everything from, "Don't worry, AI is leveling the playing field," to "Run for the hills, the robot apocalypse is nigh!" (OK, I might be paraphrasing slightly with that last one.)
These studies are not only often contradictory but also generally based on observations of small sets of carefully chosen workers in specific situations. They may tell you AI helps call center workers be more productive, or is causing one company to hire less customer service reps. But it seemed dangerous to draw wider conclusions on such an important subject from limited data.
But I just found one analysis that seems worth sharing, both because it looks at a very broad set of real-world jobs and because these particular jobs are the ones many self-employed Inc.com readers are likely to care about most -- freelance gigs. The news isn't good for three types of professionals in particular.
The jobs that are safe from AI (for now)
This analysis, from labor market trend publication Bloomberry, looks at publicly available data on more than 5 million jobs listed on freelancing site Upwork from a month before ChatGPT was released in November 2022 to just last month.
Researcher Henley Wing Chiu explains why they took this approach: "If there's going to be any impact to certain jobs, we'll probably see it first in the freelance market because large companies will be much slower in adopting AI tools."
Freelancers are essentially the canary in the scrappy, independently operated coal mine. What tune are they singing? That depends on what industry they're in. Wing Chiu observes that most freelance niches are doing just fine despite the ongoing generative AI revolution. Of 12 subcategories he looked at, the vast majority had actually seen the number of jobs listed increase since late 2022.
"Video editing/production jobs are up 39 percent, graphic design jobs are up 8 percent, and Web design jobs are up 10 percent. Software development jobs are also up, with backend development jobs up 6 percent and frontend/Web development jobs up 4 percent," he reports.
Unsurprisingly, postings looking for people with AI skills were also way up. "Jobs like generating AI content, developing AI agents, integrating OpenAI/ChatGPT APIs, and developing AI apps are becoming the rage," Wing Chiu says.
And those that need to worry
But there were three big exceptions. With apologies to my fellow word nerds, those were writing, translation, and customer service jobs. "The number of writing jobs declined 33 percent, translation jobs declined 19 percent, and customer service jobs declined 16 percent," the Bloomberry analysis found.
This is hardly the biggest shock, as some of the earliest and most developed use cases for AI are basic copywriting tasks and customer service chatbots. Swedish buy-now-pay-later startup Klarna just announced that its customer service chatbot is doing the work of 700 customer service reps, for instance, and the media has been full of stories of writers who have lost their jobs to AI replacements.
This data confirms what writers have already feared, but does it mean that video editors and graphic designers should rest easy? Wing Chiu isn't so sure. The uptick in these sorts of jobs, he warns, may be temporary, as companies figure out how to best use fast-improving video and image generation tools.
"I think there's several ways to interpret this data. One is that these generative AI tools are already good enough to replace many writing tasks, whether it's writing an article or a social-media post. But they're not polished enough for other jobs, like video and image generation," he writes.
It might also be that companies are still figuring out how best to use these tools. There was a lag of six months or so between the release of ChatGPT and the biggest decline in writing jobs. Companies might just need more time to figure the more complex case of video and image manipulation. If that's so, declines in many other fields just haven't quite arrived yet.
Whichever of these possible scenarios turns out to be correct, freelancers and entrepreneurs in fields likely to be touched by AI probably shouldn't be sitting around twiddling their thumbs and hoping it all works out.
Exactly how fast AI will come for rote and routine jobs in various sectors remains an open question no single research project can definitively answer. But whatever the exact contours of AI disruption, creativity, social savvy, agility, and dealing with ambiguity are likely to remain exclusively human domains for a long time yet. If you're worried about AI's impact on your industry, the time to make these skills central to what you offer is now.
EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM
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