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Melissa Shea hires freelancers to take on most of the basic tasks for her fashion-focused tech startup, paying $22 per hour on average for them to develop websites, transcribe audio and write marketing copy. In January 2023, she welcomed a new member to her team: ChatGPT. At $0 an hour, the chatbot can crank out more content much faster than freelancers and has replaced three content writers she would have otherwise hired through freelancing platform Upwork.

“I’m really frankly worried that millions of people are going to be without a job by the end of this year,” says Shea, cofounder of New York-based Fashion Mingle, a networking and marketing platform for fashion professionals. “I’ve never hired a writer better than ChatGPT.”

Shea has not posted a job on Upwork since she discovered ChatGPT (though she still has five freelancers working for her). After it was released in November 2022, ChatGPT amassed more than 100 million users, sparked an AI arms race at companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon and has given rise to a flurry of AI startups. And for small businesses looking to trim costs, the free tool can automate swaths of their operations, providing a cheaper alternative to freelance workers. Built on recent advances in generative AI, ChatGPT and its image-based sibling DALL-E 2 can carry out work that spans most of the freelancing spectrum, from writing articles and compiling research to designing graphics, coding and decrypting financial documents.

Now, freelancers who are less experienced and don’t offer specialized skills stand to lose their gigs, according to five clients Forbes interviewed. But rather than steering clear of the AI tool that could make them obsolete, more and more freelancers are relying on ChatGPT to do some if not all their work for them. Clients on job marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr are being flooded with nearly identical project proposals written by ChatGPT. A bitter side effect: it’s making clients dubious of the authenticity of work turned in by freelancers and causing transactional disputes and mistrust in the freelancing community.

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Illustration by Angelica Alzona for Forbes

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