Freelancers Using AI Tools Earn 40% More Per Hour Than Peers, Study Says

Freelance workers using AI tools are earning significantly more than their counterparts, with AI-related freelance earnings climbing 25% year over year and AI freelancers commanding over 40% higher hourly rates than non-AI workers, according to new data from Upwork.

The freelance marketplace analyzed over 130 work categories and tracked millions of job posts over six months, finding that generative AI is simultaneously replacing low-complexity, repetitive tasks while creating demand for AI-augmented work. Workers using AI for augmentation outnumber those using it for automation by more than 2 to 1. Freelancers with coding skills comprising at least 25% of their work now earn 11% more for identical jobs compared to November 2022 when ChatGPT launched.

AI research company says AI is good

[ebunga]

Man, even the National Egg Board isn't this biased.

Re:

[YetAnotherDrew]

Man, even the National Egg Board isn't this biased.

Yet those people are still a bit NEB-ish, aren't they?

Re:

[gweihir]

There is a National Egg Board? The mind boggles.

But yes, "people wanting to sell you something claim their product is great" has no informational value...

looking closely

[ZipNada]

If you look closely at the article it says;
"The increased freelance earnings from AI jobs are typically from people who already had experience in that particular field"
"If you were a traditional machine learning expert, and now you're augmenting that work with generative AI, you're seeing such a great premium,"

So it's a small subset of 'freelancers', and that subset was already working on AI and is comfortable with it. No telling how this applies to the general population.

Re:looking closely

[sound+vision]

I know an online gig worker who does audio transcriptions. He says his workflow is: AI does a first draft of the transcript, then he reads it simultaneously with the audio and makes corrections. (Often that involves researching technical terms and proper nouns.)

The company he works for provides the initial AI transcription. So all their workers are using the AI.

I've done transcriptions of song lyrics manually, and I've also tried it "AI-assisted" by using rough drafts from YouTube's caption generator. I can say that for the task of transcribing speech to text, AI greatly enhances productivity.

Re:

[gweihir]

I found that doing translations gets about 2x as fast with a DeepL translation as start. But it really needs careful revision, as there is the most horrific bullshit in there in quite a few places. If I do revision and translation instead of just translation, I am still faster doing it all myself.

To be fair, translation and transcriptions are essentially "better search" and that is one of the few things LLMs can do somewhat well.

Re: looking closely

[EldoranDark]

Transcription I'm on board with, but translation is often a hit and miss. A lot of the work I've seen is at the level of quality where I could have Google translated it myself if this is what I get.

Re:

[sound+vision]

Yeah, I would absolutely not trust it more than Google Translate.

Generally I wouldn't trust it for anything I can't do myself, because then I can't verify the output.

This seems to be a limitation, the limitation, for LLMs overall. You can't use them to do anything you couldn't already do. (At least, not if being correct matters. For some AI applications, like the IDF identifying "terrorists" in Gaza, being correct doesn't matter, and so it's quite suited to such things, i.e. the generation of massive amount

Come back in five years

[abulafia]

And find that "AI" is good for population control, controlling public opinion by flooding, software development, and destroying jobs where nobody cares about the product, like marketing copy, saying "no" to customers and Google search.

Re:

[gweihir]

Nice list!

Re:

[dgatwood]

Freelancers with coding skills comprising at least 25% of their work now earn 11% more for identical jobs compared to November 2022 when ChatGPT launched.

So what you're saying is that they're basically keeping up with GDP and using AI has no real benefit.

No, no. They're saying that the people who aren't using AI are getting less work because there are fewer jobs, and the people who are using AI are barely keeping up with inflation compared with the pre-AI world.

Bubble bubble bubble ... *Pop*!

[Errol backfiring]

In the first .com bubble, job offerings also promised a car and a mobile (which back then was very expensive) along with an unhealthy big salary, while the companies themselves were not sure what work should actually be done. So some people had a huge salary, but for a short time.

Re:

[gweihir]

So some people had a huge salary, but for a short time.

Yep. Like "Prompt Engineer". Apparently that bubble has already popped.

Correlation ... causation

[gweihir]

And hence this statement is meaningless.

Earn %40 More With This One Weird Trick

[MrKaos]

1. Work
2. A.I
3. ????
4. Profit!!!