Freelance translators: ChatGPT cut demand for routine and creative work, study finds

GNMT cut demand for analytical tasks, meaning regular translations, by economically meaningful amounts. It had no detectable effect on intuitive tasks, or transcreations, which need creative and cultural adaptation. ChatGPT, by contrast, reduced demand for both kinds of work, with larger and more uniform reductions.

The authors say this means conclusions about which kinds of human work resist automation do not straightforwardly carry over from predictive AI to generative AI. Creative and culturally adaptive work that looked safe from GNMT was not protected from ChatGPT.

The researchers treated the launch of GNMT and, later, ChatGPT as natural experiments in a major online labor market for translators. Difference-in-differences models on transaction-level data covered two windows, 2016 to 2017 and 2022 to 2023.

They separated work into analytical tasks, regular translations, and intuitive tasks, transcreations that require creative and cultural adaptation. This split allowed them to test whether creative work was shielded from automation.

For GNMT, demand fell for analytical tasks while intuitive tasks showed no detectable change. For ChatGPT, the reductions were substantially larger and applied to both categories, which the authors describe as a marked expansion in the scope and magnitude of AI substitution.