Matt Barrie, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Australia-based Freelancer.com said ‘AI can’t replace creativity yet’. 

It comes as Freelancer.com published new figures revealing a surge in freelance creative writing jobs, growth in business marketing activities, and an increase in on-site photography and videography gigs.

The Fast 50 Q2 2023 report, a quarterly dataset ranking the fastest growing and falling jobs on the platform, analysed over 280,000 jobs posted to Freelancer.com between April and June 2023.

According to the data, the fastest growing freelance jobs by percentage growth in Q2 2023 were:

1. Creative Writing - up 58% (from 1,868 to 2,961 jobs)

2. User Interface Design - up 52% (from 2,017 to 3,075 jobs)

3. Twitter Marketing - up 41% from (1,650 to 2,334 jobs)

4. Photography - up 40% from (2,101 to 2,945 jobs)

5. Writing (Microsoft Word) - up 38% (from 3,175 to 4,401 jobs)

Figures reviewed by Freelancer.com’s data science team revealed interest for freelance writing jobs are increasing on the platform over the last quarter. Other writing related skills also saw growth across the quarter, including copy typing (up 31.2%, 4,867 to 6,389 jobs) and ghostwriting (up 22.8%, 5,212 to 6,404 jobs).

Despite having access to freely available generative AI tools, employers are turning to on-demand freelancers to help write creative content for their websites and blogs, Freelancer.com noted.

Other jobs which have been deemed as ‘at risk’ of being automated by AI, such as data entry, have also seen an increase over the quarter. Projects for Data Processing were up 21% (from 9,076 to 11,024 jobs) and projects requiring Excel as a skill also saw a 15% increase (from 13,246 to 15,301 total job postings).

“AI can’t replace creativity yet. While workers and businesses are benefiting from productivity gains offered by generative AI, the data suggests that the technology in its current form isn’t able to replace creative work. We saw a similar trend occur in the first quarter of the year, as creative design jobs were flourishing despite interest for generative AI tripling,” Barrie said.

Freelancer.com’s report also found an increase in businesses investing heavily in freelance marketing support.

The most significant declining trend observed in the Q2 2023 report shows that employers are easing their interest for tech and IT related skills. The Fast 50 report for Q3 2022 highlighted significant growth in a number of highly specialised and niche tech skills, such as software development, android app development, programming, and others. The catalyst for demand being global mass layoffs and hiring freezes across the tech sector towards the end of 2022.

Barrie told the Indian Express that the nature of work will dramatically change as jobs will move up the stack in an AI-dominated work world.

“If you are an illustrator today, and you spend 20 to 40 hours doing an illustration, tomorrow to adapt to the world of AI, you are going to become more like a cinematographer or a director or a composer or a producer,” he told the Indian Express. “The same thing is going to happen with writing, you will be less writing the copy and function more like an editor or a sub-editor, where you will be kind of directing ChatGPT and you will be performing at a higher level.”