Almost half of Indian freelancers concerned about being replaced by AI: Report

As per the data, freelancers in India are making great use of AI design tools like Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, among others, through the design process, and the use cases of ChatGPT-4 are exploding across every white-collar job.

Around half of all freelancers (47 percent) in India are concerned about artificial intelligence (AI) tools taking over their jobs. However, 71 percent are still using generative AI tools in their work. These are predominantly used to auto-generate responses or perform tedious tasks, shows data put together for Moneycontrol by Freelancer.com.

ChatGPT is the leading AI tool being used, with more than 68 percent of it being integrated into the workplace. Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing chats are in the second place (15 percent), and GitHub Copilot and AI image generation are tied for the third spot (8 percent).

Freelancer.com, the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by number of users and jobs posted, has over 1.73 crore registered Indian freelancers and clients. In 2022, Freelancer.com added 12.29 lakh new users from India, with students making up the largest percentage at 30.5 percent.

Of those concerned about losing their jobs to AI tools, half (47 percent) are very concerned, 33 percent are somewhat concerned, and 19 percent are not concerned at all.

Change can be exciting yet frightening, especially in the uncharted territory of AI and the future that it holds. A third (30 percent) are optimistic about the new opportunities this may present and 21 percent use it to improve the accuracy of their work. Further, 19 percent believe the technology would increase productivity, requiring workers to learn new skills. Lastly, 11 percent workers feel AI will automate mundane tasks.

The most threatened jobs are task-based roles – customer support and administrative.

"There’s always some apprehension as it is hard to predict the future, particularly as AI seems to be increasingly jumping the ‘uncanny valley’ in terms of quality of work. Also, because the nature of work will change as jobs move ‘up the stack’," Matt Barrie, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Freelancer.com told Moneycontrol.

He said many illustrators won’t be illustrating like they are doing now, pushing pixels around the screen, but rather acting as cinematographers or directors of the scene.

As per the data, freelancers in India are making great use of AI design tools like Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, among others, through the design process, and the use cases of ChatGPT-4 are exploding across every white-collar job.

"The next 12 months will see an explosion in AI-powered tools across every modality and every industry sector. Hence, there are a lot of opportunities now to start a company in any white-collar industry. I expect an explosion of start-ups," Barrie said.