How Is Generative AI Impacting the Freelance Job Market? Maria del Rio-Chanona Bench Accounting for Unsplash

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How Is Generative AI Impacting the Freelance Job Market?

A novel paper led by an international research team shows how ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools are reshaping the workforce.

A new study led by an international research team reveals the surprising impact of generative AI tools like ChatGPT on the freelance workforce. The research, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, is the largest of its kind, analysing over 3 million job postings on a global freelancing platform. The data covers a period of about one year before and after the introduction of ChatGPT.

“Rather than the feared wave of job losses, our study reveals a clear shift in demand,” says co-author Maria del Rio-Chanona, an external faculty member at CSH and an assistant professor at University College London. Tasks considered easily replaceable saw sharp declines—for example, jobs for writing “About Us” pages dropped by 50%, translation work for Western languages fell by 30%, and translations for other languages declined by around 20%. Short-term contracts and experienced freelancers were particularly affected, the researcher notes.

“While demand for experts in replaceable skills is shrinking, it is rising for complementary skills,” del Rio-Chanona explains. These include critical thinking, complex problem-solving, and interpersonal abilities—skills that enhance the use of new technologies rather than being replaced by them. Notably, demand for machine learning expertise has grown by 24%, and the development of AI chatbots has nearly tripled. “Understanding these shifts can help individuals better adapt to the evolving job market,” she adds.

Key Insights:

  • Some Jobs Are Vanishing, But Others Are Thriving. In some areas of work (such as highly repetitive writing tasks), ChatGPT leads to an effective reduction of labour demand, relative to the overall labour market trend. Jobs involving skills that can be partly substituted, such as writing and translating, have seen demand drop by 20 to 50 per cent, as tools take over these tasks.

 

  • New Roles Are Emerging. Generative AI is driving demand for skills that complement generative AI technologies. This can partially be attributed to the hype around artificial intelligence, which creates new AI-related products and services that require specialists in chatbot development or machine learning. The demand for chatbot and natural language processing jobs has almost tripled since the launch of ChatGPT.

     

  • Experience Matters. For skills that are substitutable by ChatGPT, such as writing and translation work, the largest reduction in demand was for experienced workers. For complementary skills like coding there was a reduction in demand for novice workers as companies sought out professionals with greater experience.

 

  • Generative AI Isn’t the Job Killer We Thought It Was. ChatGPT is not the big job killer many fear; instead, the net demand for freelancing jobs has increased after the launch of ChatGPT. Generative AI is the latest trend in the long digital transformation process of the economy that started with the rise of computers and the internet.

Challenges and Opportunities

“Generative AI is accelerating the transformation of the job market; a process that started decades ago with the introduction of computers to the workplace,” points out co-author Fabian Braesemann, from the Oxford Internet Institute. “It is the latest development of that digitalisation process: whilst the demand for partly substitutable skills such as writing and translating has reduced, we also see new jobs being created, such as roles creating chatbots or other machine learning related jobs.”

“The widespread take up of Chat GPT and similar AI tools creates challenges for workers, but also presents opportunities to make processes more efficient and develop new products and services,” adds first author Ole Teutloff, from the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science.

How Is Generative AI Impacting the Freelance Job Market? Maria del Rio-Chanona
Graph shows estimated change in demand for substitutable and complementary skills relative to unaffected skills, following ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022.

About the Study

The study “Winners and losers of generative AI: Early Evidence of Shifts in Freelancer Demand” by Ole Teutloff, Johanna Einsiedler, Otto Kässi, Fabian Braesemann, Pamela Mishkin, and R. Maria del Rio-Chanona, was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

This text is based on a press release from the Oxford Internet Institute.

Researchers

Related

29.01.2025
O. Teutloff, J. Einsiedler, O. Kässi, F. Braesemann, P. Mishkin, R.M. del Rio-Chanona
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Eine Studie zeigt: Während KI schon einige Jobs zunichte…
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