Researchers from Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research, and Imperial College London Business School studied 1,388,711 job posts on a major (but undisclosed) global freelance work marketplace from July 2021 to July 2023, and found that demand for such automation-prone jobs had fallen 21% just eight months after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Writing jobs were most affected, followed by software, app, and web development work, as well as engineering jobs. The large language models that underpin tools like ChatGPT are trained on large amounts of text to predict the most likely next word in a sequence.
