Work at the Frontier: AI's effect on freelance work

aavci

From what I read about the freelancers’ perspective, a lot of the newer gigs they get are to clean up work already done by AI instead of the opportunity to start new like they did in the past.

dominotw

so 'build me ebay clone for $500" is still not possible. Would be interesting to see how it changed on toptal.

ActionHank

Wow, so cool, I'm sure the world really wants to know OAI's thoughts on freelance work. I'm just real tired of these companies inserting themselves everywhere. I look forward to when investors realise that their money was just yeeted into the furnace and the budget for this sort of thing evaporates.

armcat

Would be nice with a concise executive summary at the top. My interpretation: AI may be commoditising individual tasks while increasing demand for people who can combine those tasks into complete deliverables. That’s my whole read with some nuances on the different task shifts.

civicsquid

It sounds like they're mainly saying that there are certain categories of work in which people use AI to handle things themselves (directly via ChatGPT) and other categories for which they still post a freelance listing (especially if it requires skills across multiple domains). Writing, illustration, and tech support seem to be the categories people handle themselves most often via AI, according to the first graphic... But then the second graphic suggests that the number of freelance postings for a top 'do-it-yourself-with-AI' category like writing is only down about 0.5% year over year. That almost suggests there isn't really an effect. Even the largest-changing category in that graphic, web development, is down only about 2%. I think I conceptually can agree with their implication that AI allows freelancers to take on more breadth on their own, but the data/graphics they're presenting are confusing me. I'm not sure I get it.

eatonphil

I pay an illustrator for every illustration on The Consensus, and paid a graphic designer for the logo after doing a first version myself. AI artwork, let alone AI writing, is just not great for your image. You can find an illustrator anywhere in the world for the budget you'd like to spend (The Consensus is bootstrapped, a shoe-string budget). Would love to stop seeing tech companies using AI illustrations.

darrinm

Maybe I missed it or maybe they are dodging the bigger question: is freelance work and the amount of money paid for it going up or down and by how much?

falkuall

From my own experience as a full time developer who is doing some side quests beside my main job - I’ll speak for myself, I got lucky to help a company get AI ready and help them define what ‘success’ even means working with it. And thinking about other companies who are just using it without a plan or strategy just gives me the feeling that this consultant / implementation work will rather be more than less within the next couple of years.