Freelance Writing Work Shrank 31% as a Share of Upwork Job Posts

Content writing made up 14.5% of the ChatGPT conversations in a new study, but only 1.3% of job posts on the freelance site Upwork. Its slice of those job posts shrank by about 31% in a single year.

The figures come from a joint report by OpenAI and Upwork. OpenAI set out the main findings in a research summary published on 10 November. Upwork is an online marketplace where companies hire freelancers for short projects. The researchers compared 36,896 sampled ChatGPT conversations from January 2025 to June 2026 with the jobs that clients posted on Upwork. An AI classifier sorted the conversations, and OpenAI says no researcher read user messages.

Freelancing is not a niche. Upwork’s own survey this year found that 38% of skilled American knowledge workers do freelance work.

Where the work is moving

The full report finds that the share of Upwork job posts asking for content writing fell by roughly 31% between the first half of 2025 and the first half of 2026. In plain terms, some clients may now draft blog posts, marketing copy and product descriptions with ChatGPT instead of paying a freelancer. The authors say firms “may be using AI directly for this task instead of hiring remote workers”, and they warn this could put pressure on freelancers who specialise in writing.

Video shows the opposite pattern. Video and animation made up 10.0% of Upwork job posts but just 1.0% of the ChatGPT conversations. Between early 2023 and late 2025, its job posts grew by about a third relative to the whole marketplace. Mobile app work looks similar, with 7.8% of job posts and 0.2% of conversations.

The researchers checked 63 types of work. In 43 of them, tasks that were common in ChatGPT lost ground on Upwork, or tasks that were rare in ChatGPT gained ground. The other 20 went the other way, so ChatGPT use alone does not explain the shift.

Bigger budgets for AI projects

For similar work posted in the same month, fixed-price budgets were about 52% higher when the job involved AI. Freelancers on hourly contracts logged about 41% more hours on such work in the first 90 days. Hourly rates were only 1.5% higher. That points to larger projects, not better pay per hour.

What the numbers do not show

A smaller share is not the same as fewer jobs. The report says its comparison does not measure overall growth on the site, and it does not prove that ChatGPT caused the change. Both companies also have a stake in how AI and freelance work are seen, and the study rests on their own data.

Earlier this month, another study found that people who use AI at work are putting in longer days. In a separate test, the best coding agent fully completed only 26.4% of real tasks.

Why it matters: Freelance writing is one of the first kinds of paid work where AI use shows up in hard numbers. Writers are losing ground on Upwork, while projects that involve AI are getting bigger.