It’s hard to open a news website or jump on social media without coming across some AI-related content. And a lot of it discusses what the future of work looks like with new generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Dall-E and Midjourney. And while journalists, lawyers and a number of other white collar professions appear to be first in line to be disrupted by AI, there is one labour force that is being disrupted today: offshore, outsourced workers.
These workers often work as contractors for western companies or find work through platforms like Freelancer, Fiverr or 99Designs. This article from Rest of World spoke to outsourced workers from Manila to Lahore to Cairo and catalogued the way that these outsourced workers are seeing generative AI compete with them for work.
“If generative AI represents a tectonic shift in the way we work, offshore outsourced workers are at the fault lines.”
As much as these AI tools represent a disruption to offshore, outsourced workers, they also represent an opportunity. In many ways, they will become a great equaliser. When workers across the world have access to the same AI tools and can achieve the same AI-enhanced levels of productivity, the relatively lower salaries of workers in India, the Philippines and the rest of the Global South will become attractive to multinational companies.
To illustrate these changes, Rest of World commissioned four outsourced workers to do the same piece of work with AI and without AI and then compared the time and cost difference. For example, this fashion shoot:
The cost and time difference offer an insight into how much the world is starting to change.
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