3/5/2024: Who is Being Replaced by AI?

I recently came across this article by Bloomberry about how AI is shaping the job market. It analyzed 5 million job postings during a 12-month period on UpWork starting from one month before ChatGPT launched in late 2022. The findings are quite interesting. It looked at the top 12 freelance job categories on UpWork and found while most categories experienced growth, three categories experienced a substantial decline. The number of writing jobs declined 33%, translation jobs declined 19%, and customer service jobs declined 16%. The hourly rates for translation and writing jobs also declined ~20% and ~4% respectively. This is hardly surprising but gives us hints on how AI is disrupting the labor market.

In the article, it also mentioned that more video editing jobs were posted while the hourly rates for these video editing jobs declined, which makes sense as the tool for video editing becomes more accessible with AI. There are also many AI related jobs being posted such as chatbot creation, integration and image generation. It appears that while some jobs are being annihilated, more jobs are being created.

I don’t feel bad about translation jobs becoming obsolete. AI can do translation as well as humans these days. It’s great. It freed up human capital to do other more creative things. I also don’t feel bad about the disappearance of writing jobs on UpWork. The writing jobs on UpWork are mostly content marketing gigs that aim to produce content for SEO (search engine optimization). This type of content is mostly soulless keyword stuffing to rank high on Google. Though, I am worried that AI is creating multiple orders of magnitude more of soulless junk content. This is making our already terrible internet worse. I just hope LLMs don’t make themselves dumber by feeding themselves LLM generated junk content.