AI Era Job Displacements and Future Prospects: What’s the Job That Increased by 2000%?

Hello, today I want to discuss the jobs being replaced by the advent of LLMs and what the future holds. As we see a daily flood of AI news, thoughts like “AI will replace all jobs” and “It will also create many new ones” may cross your mind. What do you think?

We’ll take a closer look at the jobs on UPWORK, analyzing 5 million freelancers to identify those negatively affected and the ones that have seen an explosive 2000% growth.

Although many feel the significant changes AI will bring to our future, not everyone knows how to approach it. I hope this serves as a helpful guide for those navigating these changes.

AI Jobs

In analyzing the 12 most popular job categories on Upwork, it was found that the number of jobs has increased in most categories since the release of ChatGPT. However, significant decreases were observed in writing, translation, and customer service roles. The writing sector saw a 33% decrease, translation jobs a 19% decrease, and customer service roles a 16% decrease. The emergence of generative AI has led to the replacement of services in writing, translation, and customer service with AI solutions.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are already good enough to replace many writing tasks. However, they are not yet perfect for other jobs, such as video and image creation. It will take time for users to learn how to use these tools effectively and understand their capabilities and limitations. The decrease in writing jobs did not start immediately after ChatGPT’s release but accelerated nearly 10 months later, in August. Thus, continuous attention and research on generative AI could be beneficial in many aspects.

AI Era: Necessary Jobs

The AI era requires more than just technical skills; creativity and critical thinking, the ‘human-only abilities,’ have become increasingly important. For example, designers and management consultants are utilizing AI to produce more creative outcomes.

While some jobs are experiencing a decrease in demand due to AI, there are indeed jobs where demand is actually increasing. Contrary to the initial assumption of an early rise in data annotation/labelling and machine learning jobs, data annotation roles have shown a fairly flat trend over the last 10 months, and the number of machine learning jobs has slightly decreased since the release of ChatGPT. Even the world’s largest companies haven’t seen a noticeable increase in demand for machine learning, indicating that companies might be hiring more machine learning engineers outside of Upwork. However, jobs in AI content creation, AI agent development, OpenAI/ChatGPT API integration, and AI app development are gaining popularity, with chatbot development being the most notable use case. Job postings related to chatbots have increased explosively by 2000% following the release of ChatGPT and the OpenAI API.

How to Respond to AI Job Market Changes?

The seismic shift in the job market due to AI has already begun. How can we coexist with AI in the job market? The impact of AI is most pronounced in the low-skilled labor market, but these changes also create new job opportunities, and it’s important to maintain flexibility to adapt to technological changes.

“The future will be divided between those who can handle AI and those who cannot.” As profound as this statement is about being dominated or dominating, it all depends on how well we can utilize smart AI.

We must adopt a lifelong learning attitude. Avoiding learning due to “not being able to use computers” or “phones” should not be an excuse, as becoming insensitive to digital changes seems to lead to a socially isolated life. Perhaps embracing the changes of the future through numerous free education opportunities without resisting learning new technologies is the way forward.

Lastly, exchanging ideas with people from various fields and keeping up with AI-related news to understand the opportunities and best responses in the AI era could be one strategy.

Ultimately, the way to cope with the job market changes in the AI era is not to fear change but to continue learning and to enhance our own strengths. In an era where companies and brands are becoming more downsized, leveraging our strengths and presenting them to the world with services that utilize AI might make us winners in this current trend.

Future Job Prospects

As AI technology advances, jobs traditionally divided among many are now being concentrated in fewer hands, thanks to AI taking over tasks previously done by humans. Some companies have managed to save a lot of money by reducing labor costs due to AI, and many people are making significant profits in a short time by developing chatbots and matching services.

I believe the greatest strength of AI is efficiency. How efficiently can we use AI for the production, services, and marketing we have been doing? And what will I utilize it for? This made me rethink.

I hope you all have a great day.