Replacing jobs with AI isn't a theoretical idea, a new study suggests, but something that's happening — now.

Henley Wing Chiu, a Queens, New York-based researcher at job and employment trend website Bloomberry, looked at five million data points to see which jobs AI is most likely to replace and which jobs are already being replaced.

Chiu, who is also the co-founder of the content marketing platform BuzzSumotook the 12 most popular freelance job categories on Upwork, a freelance hub, and tracked how posts changed over 30 days before ChatGPT's public debut until February 2024.

It found that most job categories showed an increase in the number of posts, with three notable exceptions: writing, translation and customer service.

Connected: JPMorgan says AI cash flow software reduces human labor by almost 90%

Writing jobs fell 33%, translation jobs fell 19%, and customer service jobs fell 16%, all from November 1, 2022 to February 14, 2024.

“I definitely expected write jobs to decrease, as this is probably the most popular use case for ChatGPT, and this was reflected in the -33% decrease in write jobs,” Chiu wrote.

He elaborated that the decline in customer service jobs was not surprising either due to the rise of AI customer service chatbots.

Connected: Klarna says its AI Assistant does the work of 700 people. The company laid off the same number of employees 2 years ago.

Almost all other categories saw increases in job postings, with video editing/production jobs the highest at 39%. Graphic design, web design, accounting, sales, and posting freelance web development gigs also increased.

Chiu stated in the report that he decided to analyze freelance jobs rather than full-time or part-time jobs because the freelance market was more likely to see the impact of AI first.

He gave some explanations for the data: AI generation tools may be good enough now to replace writing tasks, but not yet up to par for quality results in tasks like image or video generation. However, this may change as OpenAI recently announced its Sora text-to-video AI generator.

Another explanation could be that users do not yet understand how to fully utilize AI tools.

Connected: You Can Fear It and Still Use It – Why Are So Many American Workers AI-Shy?

or Upwork Survey 2023 showed that freelancers make up 38% of the US workforce and that they are 2.2 times more likely to regularly use generative AI than other professionals for tasks such as research, brainstorming and coding.