Content writing's share of Upwork freelance jobs fell about 31% in a year, OpenAI and Upwork report
OpenAI wrote the study with Upwork. It tracks shares of postings, not jobs or pay, so it cannot show total demand fell.
OpenAI’s Economic Research team and Upwork, a freelance marketplace, compared what people ask ChatGPT to do with what clients post as jobs on Upwork. The ChatGPT side is 36,896 sampled personal and work conversations from January 2025 to June 2026. Content writing alone is 14.5% of those conversations, against 1.3% of Upwork postings. Video and animation is the reverse: 1.0% of conversations and 10.0% of postings. Upwork’s own survey found that 38% of skilled US knowledge workers freelance.
Of 63 matched work categories, 43 fit one pattern: categories common in ChatGPT lost share of Upwork postings between the first half of 2023 and the second half of 2025, and uncommon ones gained. The other 20 went the other way. Content writing’s share of postings fell about 31% from the first half of 2025 to the first half of 2026, while video and animation postings grew by about a third relative to the whole marketplace in the earlier period.
Postings that ask for AI skills or tools look different from the rest. For similar work posted in the same month, fixed-price budgets were 52% higher, and hired hourly contracts logged 41% more hours in their first 90 days. Posted hourly rates were 1.5% higher, so the gap comes from bigger projects, not dearer hours. The mix of tasks in these postings also widened, from the equivalent of 14.6 equally common tasks in early 2023 to 21.2 in late 2025.
What it means
For freelancers, the study points to demand moving between kinds of work: writing lost share while video and animation gained. The authors say it is not a simple story of AI replacing hired help.
Caveats
- OpenAI sells ChatGPT and co-wrote the study with Upwork. Nobody outside the two companies has checked it.
- The study reports shares of postings. The full report says its charts do not measure total Marketplace growth, so we do not know whether the number of postings or freelancer income rose or fell.
- It is a correlation across 63 categories on one platform. The report says it does not show that ChatGPT use caused the changes, and the two datasets are not matched or representative of the labour market as a whole.
- Whether a posting is “AI-related” was decided by a classifier, and ChatGPT conversations were sorted into categories by an OpenAI model. The larger budgets may reflect bigger scope, which the authors also suggest.