5 million pieces of data tell you that these jobs are being replaced by AI

Titanium Media APP

2024-06-25 19:42Published on the official account of Beijing Titanium Media APP

Crow Intelligence said

Since the advent of ChatGPT, everyone has believed that many jobs will be replaced by AI in the future.

But you can't imagine that this has already happened.

In February this year, a foreign blogger named Henley Wing Chiu, in order to figure out the question of "which jobs are more likely to be replaced by AI", he specifically studied the actual freelance work data on Upwork from November 1, 2022 (a month before the release of ChatGPT) to February 14, 2024, and came to the following conclusions:

1. Since the release of ChatGPT, writing, customer service, and translation jobs on Upwork have been the most affected, with translations suffering from both volume and price: not only has the number of jobs dropped by 19%, but hourly wages have also dropped by more than 20%.

2. Surprisingly, jobs such as web design, graphic design, software development, and video production have not only not seen a decline in demand, but have even increased, with hourly wages for graphic design and web design jobs also rising slightly.

3.AI development has also led to a lot of new job opportunities. Contrary to what many people think, the amount of work related to data annotation and machine learning has not increased, but the number of jobs related to developing chatbots has skyrocketed by 2,000%.

After the release of ChatGPT, the demand for writing, translation, and customer service dropped significantly

The blogger chose the 12 most popular job categories on Upwork and analyzed the 84-day moving averages of these categories over about 3 months. Surprisingly, since the release of ChatGPT, the number of jobs has actually increased in most job categories, but there are 3 categories where the number of jobs has dropped significantly.

The number of new jobs in each category of Upwork since the launch of ChatPT

The top 3 categories with the largest decline in the number of jobs are writing, translation, and customer service jobs. The number of writing jobs is down 33 percent, translation jobs are down 19 percent, and customer service jobs are down 16 percent.

The number of video editing jobs increased by 39% instead of decreasing

With the exception of a few job categories mentioned above, most other job categories have not been negatively affected – in fact, the number of jobs has increased.

Changes in the number of Upwork jobs since the release of ChatGPT

Since the release of ChatGPT, the number of video editing/production jobs has increased by 39%, graphic design jobs by 8%, and web design jobs by 10%. There was also an increase in software development efforts, with a 6% increase in back-end development efforts and a 4% increase in front-end/web development efforts.

Since I've heard a lot of stories of people using ChatGPT to generate code, illustrations, and even full-length videos, I'm surprised to see an increase in the number of graphic design, video editing/production, and even software development jobs. I think this data can be explained in several ways:

One possibility is that these generative AI tools are good enough to replace many writing tasks, whether it's writing articles or social media posts. But for other jobs, such as video and image generation, they are not perfect enough. Personally, I need a lot of prompts to be happy with the images that DALL-E created for my blog posts, and that's just because I'm not too picky.

So, if you're creating images that require a lot of detail, these AI tools may not be good enough. Again, for video, we've seen some tools that seem to make a lot of complex video scenes, but can they really create a full trailer or customer tutorial video? Not yet, although that may change in a few months.

Another explanation is that users need time to learn how to use these tools effectively and understand their capabilities and limitations. If we look at the graph of the decline in the number of writing jobs, we will see that it began to decline shortly after the release of ChatGPT, but the rate of decline did not begin to pick up until August (almost ten months after the release of ChatGPT).

Translators' hourly wages have fallen by more than 20%, and graphic design and web design are the most resilient

Is there a correlation between a decline in the number of jobs and a decrease in pay? Unfortunately, there's no publicly available way to know exactly how much freelancers actually get, so for this study, I had to pull the estimated hourly wage range specified in the job posting, which would be an approximate estimate of what a freelancer actually earns.

Changes in the hourly rate for each category of job postings on Upwork

As the chart shows, translation jobs were the hardest hit with hourly wages falling by more than 20%, followed by video editing/production and market research. Graphic design and web design work are the most resilient. Not only have they increased in number, but hourly wages have also risen slightly.

Overall, I think it's hard to draw exact conclusions from this data. Many pay changes may just be normal seasonal fluctuations. However, there is one clear conclusion: graphic design and web design jobs are still in demand and have not yet been replaced by AI tools.

Again, I think it's because tools like DALL-E and MidJourney require some knowledge and creativity. This is evident in some job postings, which explicitly call for finding an AI image creation expert. Unlike writing an essay, using AI tools to create visually stunning images requires knowing how to construct good prompt words, how to adjust them, and a lot of trial and error.

MidJourney的兼职招聘

Chatbot jobs exploded, with demand surging by 2,000%.

Well, we already know which jobs are declining in demand, but which ones are actually increasing due to the development of AI?

My first reaction was that there should be an increased demand for data annotation jobs to help train and fine-tune large language models (LLMs), and for those who find annotated data, freelancing platforms are the best option. While I don't expect most companies to hire a lot of machine learning experts on Upwork, the number of machine learning jobs should at least increase, right?

As it turned out, both assumptions were completely wrong. While there was an initial increase in data labeling efforts, the volume of data labeling efforts has remained stable over the past 10 months. And since the release of ChatGPT, the number of machine learning jobs has actually decreased.

Upwork adds the number of jobs that are annotated every day

Upwork adds the number of machine learning jobs every day

Maybe the company hires more machine learning engineers outside of Upwork. After all, who would leave important, professional machine learning work to a freelancer? However, even if we look at the world's largest companies, the demand for machine learning has not increased significantly.

Percentage of companies mentioning machine learning in job openings over time (average 84 days move)

On the other that generate AI content, develop AI agents, integrate OpenAI/ChatGPT APIs, and develop AI applications are becoming increasingly popular. But what are the hottest use cases? It's a chatbot. Since the release of ChatGPT and the OpenAI API, the number of jobs related to developing chatbots has surged by 2000%. If there's a killer use case for AI today, it's developing chatbots.

Upwork adds the number of jobs related to AI chatbots every day

I think one of the conclusions that can be drawn from this is that most companies aren't doing those exciting jobs like developing their own large language models (LLMs) or tuning with a lot of training data. Instead, they're more about integrating OpenAI's APIs into existing products and developing chatbots as an alternative to customer service agents.

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