Technology @beehaw.org coyotino [he/him] @beehaw.org 2 wk. ago

ChatGPT has caused a massive drop in demand for online digital freelancers — here is what you can do to protect yourself

www.techradar.com ChatGPT has caused a massive drop in demand for online digital freelancers — here is what you can do to protect yourself

You're not competing with AI, it's competing with you

63 comments

As a graphic designer for 25+ years, I recommend getting used to, and enjoying, rice and beans.
- If current "AI" is taking one's job as a graphics designer, it means that one isn't a very good graphics designer.
  
  I think more likely answer is that most businesses are cheap and a mediocre image generated by AI is good enough vs paying a human to make a really good one.
  
  Good GFX designers are expensive. AI is cheap. Welcome to capitalism.
  
  Most clients don't understand art or graphics to begin with, I guess. They just wanted someone good at Illustrator.
AI = productivity goes up, quality goes down
- I think the bitter lesson here is that there's a bunch of jobs where quality has zero importance.
  
  If you take for example, content marketing, SEO, and ad copy writing... It's a lot of bullshit, and it's been filling the web with gpt-grade slop for 20 years now. If you can do the same for cheap I don't see a reason not to.
  
  Fair point. There are lot of morons who should be replaced. But we are talking about freelancers, not about SEO or content marketing, more like content filling. But it got worse since AI rise up.
  
  I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn't stop to think or do any research.
  
  I think the quality definitely degraded, but that's exactly what capitalism wanted. It's going to darwin a big chunk of us through climate change that's accelerated by the electricity needs.
Kind of depressing that the answer to not being replaced by AI is "learn to use it and spend your day fixing its fuckups", like that's somehow a meaningful way to live for someone who previously had an actual creative job.
Automation-prone fields like writing, software, and app development saw a 21% decrease in job listings

Maybe, but hard disagree that software is being automated away.
- It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.
  
  Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.
  
  If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.
  
  AI is also going to run into a wall because it needs continual updates with more human-made data, but the supply of all that is going to dry up once the humans who create new content have been driven out of business.
  
  It's almost like AIs have been developed and promoted by people who have no ability to think about anything but their profits for the next 12 months.
  
  It’s the same in many fields. Trainees learn by doing the easy, repetitive work that can now be automated.
- I use it for software, but you really need to know what you are doing to understand what is wrong and ask it to redo it in a different way. I still think it saves time, but the ability to generate fully realized applications is a ways away.
- The headline says "digital freelancers," so maybe it's talking primarily about small jobs that were being outsourced. A 21% decrease in regular job listings would be more concerning because of the amount of incorrect information and buggy software about to be created than job loss.
  
  Well at least the buggy software will eventually generate more jobs because they need more hands fixing everything while AI can’t do it.
  
  Read the article then, because software devs are specifically mentioned
I was traveling this week, and saw a couple very obviously AI-generated billboards for the city's downtown. Something about downtown eats or something. They were, and I'm being extremely nice here, absolutely hideous. I have never, in all my life, seen such ugly billboards. And, while they were different, they were basically the same thing (does that make sense? Them being different, but the same? Not really sure how else to describe it). I was actually looking for a place to eat, and those things deterred me from going downtown. Ended up finding this cute little coffeeshop in some random side road. No food, but holy crap the coffee and crepes were good!
- Are crepes not a food?
  
  I mean.... they do have protein, fruits, and such, so, yes. But I was craving some pasta. I guess a crepe is like a sweet pasta. I did feel the craving vanish... ...
- Precisely what designers do - they make the visuals Pleasing. Doesn't mater if it's for goat sacrifice service or granny's muffin shop.
  
  It is a skill that can barely be learned by a person. Often very good designers have 'talent' or 'good eye'.
  
  Even though art is subjective, you can still pretty much rank designers.
This is one area where I am vehemently in support of IP protection for all the writers and artists' works being used. Unfortunately, unlike when it comes to suing individuals who copy something, the wholesale theft of generations of art and writing by AI companies is just being let slide.

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