Freelancing services like Upwork and Fiverr are canaries in the coal mine for knowledge workers. When the economy is tight or budgets are down, for example, these services and services providers lose customers as companies do less creative work or outside development.
But what happens when a sea change comes to the entire freelancing industry?
This is what happens:
This chart from a Wall Street Journal article on decimated freelancers is deeply troubling. It shows the fall in pay of low-value writing, translation, and sales and marketing tasks on the aggregate. While the chart is a bit misleading — low-value tasks are not quite explained here except that they are “repetitive, routine and can often be automated” — the trend is clear. Even “high value” writing is falling while translation and design isn’t increasing in line with any major economic indicator.
And freelancers are important. From the article:
But freelancers represent an increasing proportion of the workforce: One study by Upwork found 38% of Americans did some kind of freelance work in 2022. For this type of work, it’s sometimes the case that the bulk of a person’s job is doing precisely the tasks that can be automated—and that can put their entire livelihood at risk.
But the stats aren’t the only story. Many jobs are being phased out in the creative industry thanks to Midjourney and the like. For example, Reid Southen, a concept artist for movies and TV shows like Blue Beetle and Matrix Resurrections, saw his income drop to less than half of what he usually makes. His job involves creating early-stage sketches and he’s increasingly being replaced by AI as producers cut costs. AI tools like Midjourney are taking over much of this work, leaving artists like Southen to make minor adjustments to AI-created images.
“You can talk to any artist at this point, and they have a story about how they were given AI reference material to work from, or lost a job,” Southen told the WSJ.
The question here is how to move forward with AI in the picture. The pragmatists will say if you can’t beat it, join it, using AI to create the same images or writing or translation you’d once do by hand and tweaking it so it’s not absolute dross. This is fine if you’re experienced as Southen but, again, how do you learn to fix AI creations if you don’t have experience in creating the media in the first place? Making tweaks to AI art is akin to fixing a photocopy of the Mona Lisa so it can be hung in the Louvre. The question is, quite simply, why?
The optimist will say that this is all a mistake, that freelancers will come roaring back when we realize that AI-created content is junk. This will never be the case. AI is getting better and better and the pragmatist’s view, however dangerous, is the default.
In the end freelancers will have to learn to live in a weird new world. Writers and translators must be ready to pivot or offer something more than basic content. Artists will need to get used to playing second fiddle to AI. And folks in full time positions who are using freelancers should go back to supporting humans lest they find themselves on the wrong side of things when they’re inevitably laid off. Freelancers and AI can coexist. We humans just have to make sure we’re the ones who get the lion’s share of the cash.
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