Future-proofing Your Freelance Career in the Age of AI

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Freelancing has seen some big changes this year, but that's okay, because you're listening to. The Future is Freelance podcast, the show for solopreneurs, digital nomads and slow mads, consultants, remote workers, e-residents and people living a life without traditional boundaries. We're here for everyone who defies categorisation and instead makes a living and a life their own way. Every Freelance Friday, we bring you expert tips, inspired insights and stories from the frontiers of freelancing to help you achieve success with your borderless business, whatever that success looks like and means to you as you live life on your own terms. Today, I'm sharing with you a presentation I've created for the Nomad World Festival in Portugal. This is for October 2023, and you'll be hearing it after I've already shared it lying on stage. I look forward to sharing a lot more with you about the festival itself after the fact, and I'll be doing my best to record some live podcast and video there, so that's going to be exciting and fun to work with afterwards, but for now, this is what I'm taking with me to share with all of them, because it's one of the most important subjects in freelancing that are certainly of this year. Freelance has changed forever in 2023, right. We're all used to change, though, and we've seen it before. Anyway, we're certainly as freelancers, we're used to dealing with things shifting, so we can always see the opportunities in every challenge and we can rise to every challenge. And that's really the message that I want to get across and why I wanted this message to have a broader airing on the podcast as well as on the stage at Nomad Festival, because freelancers are always taking the lead in this kind of thing and adapting and making changes in life and the way that we do business. We're out ahead of the rest of the big corporates and, in fact, the only data I could find which I find out how freelancers are using AI on a quantitative way, the only data I could find is actually already months out of date and I dare say that the shift is even bigger, that I would be incredibly surprised if it's not way over 50% of freelancers using AI in one way or another, and I think it's fair to say we've always used it. If there's another freelance writer listening who hasn't used a spell check, it's quite hard to turn it off in some programs and you might well have used something like Grammarly or ProWriting. You might have used Google Translate. These are all AI tools. It's just the big visibility shift we've had this year with large language models. That has made us start to think of things as a whole new category. So it's important to realize that this isn't as strange as it seems. What it's done is just remove a layer of friction and it's put some of these tools in the hands of people who didn't have them before, and certainly for a lot of us who rely on creating things to make a living, it has shaken up the way we do things. So how do we respond to that as freelancers? It's a challenge and it's one we've simply got to rise to, otherwise we will get passed by. We know this from history, when there have been big shake-ups in industry. We need to recognize that every technological advance that the universe brings us does have benefits, and, in the same way that the home computing or the smartphone, the way that we travel, the way that we communicate all of these things have enhanced our ability to run our freelance businesses and therefore, by default, to run our lives the way that we want to, ai is bringing us lots of benefits too. We can be more efficient, we can be more productive. We can automate tasks that we find difficult or tedious or error prone. We can use these kind of matching skills that we find in the algorithms the things that tell you what to watch next on Netflix can also be deployed to really drill down into matching with the right clients and opportunities and resources to try and make your freelancing better. It's just a case of getting out ahead of it and knowing how to use it. We have to do all of that staying ahead of it in the context of a great deal of challenge and uncertainty. Any of us working within the technology industry in any way, whether in a creative way or a technical way, has seen great change this year in terms of churn within employers and hiring. That's created some opportunities for freelancers. This also created some challenges. We have to recognise that this is part of that ongoing change. Ais are starting to replace some rules that were previously done by humans. We can't deny that. We just have to try and do all that we can to make sure that we are not the humans getting replaced. We have to raise our game and use these tools in a way that's intelligent and relevant and also that isn't going to undermine what we're doing. We need to recognise, for example, that some of the concerns about AI revolve around its error proneness. I don't like the word hallucinations being used in application to large language models, because I think that's humanising things inappropriately. They basically make stuff up, because all they're doing is basically acting as spell checkers or autocorrects, but at the paragraph level or at the chapter level with some of the largest models now, and they will tell people what they want to hear. I think one of the cases that we will never forget from earlier this year was the lawyer who went to court and read out defences which had been generated by chat, gpt, referencing case history and precedence that didn't actually exist but had been automatically generated to substantiate the case he wanted to make, and of course, the whole thing got thrown out. But you just cringe for that professional who tried to pass off work that wasn't his own or tried to cut corners by using this technology completely inappropriately, somehow thinking he was asking some kind of robot lawyer to do the leg work for him on the case, and of course that didn't work. So whilst, of course, we have anxieties about being replaced, we need to recognise that humans are still needed and it's just important for us, as freelancers, to be very, very honest about how we're using this technology, what we want from it, what we don't want, and we have to figure out how we're going to navigate this, because there's a lot of industrial action going on in the world at the moment. If we were screenwriters, we, as part of a big guild that you know, they've just been on strike in the US and secured what they consider a good deal to return to work. We don't have unions as freelancers. We just have us and our clients and a one to one negotiation, and that means, you know, there are lots of good things associated with that. That means that we can negotiate based on our unique value and what we bring to a situation or to a project, but it also means no one's going to collectively bargain for us and get us things that will apply to a whole group. There are going to be freelancers who fall through the cracks in this. We just need to make sure it's not any of us, because every time there is a big technological change, some jobs get replaced, some jobs disappear and never come back, and we need to make sure that we're not among them and we need to just keep our eyes on the benefits as well and the opportunities that will be created as this shift unfolds, and we also need to recognize that this is tricky for our clients to navigate as well. Earlier this year, I published a statement and sent it to everybody I was working with about how I am using large language models like chat, gpt, in my content creation, because I do not want clients or prospective clients thinking I think she's just going to plug my brief into an AI and give me what comes back. I would hate anybody to think that when I'm pitching for work with them. I don't think the people I've worked with for years would think it, but it must be in the back of the mind of anybody hiring something creative. Now Are they going to do it? Are they going to get a machine to do it? So I went through and very explicitly detailed exactly how I'm using it, how I'm not using it, how I promise not to use it and what I pledge to my clients in terms of just being very, very clear, what they get when they hire me, and that that hasn't changed, even though I will always use the latest tools at my disposal, whether that's my well-thumbed thesaurus 20 years ago or latest large language models. Now I'll put to work for certain very specific aspects of the content creation process, but I wanted people to understand what they get when they hire me, and that that really has not changed. So what do we need to think about then? This is important how am I using these tools If I'm telling my clients that I'm not using it to replace the value that I bring on my creative process? I wanted to go through some examples, both from my own experience and also from other freelancers that I've been talking to, and I'm sure that you will have lots of examples of your own, and we could start Twitter thread about this or something, some collective document maybe, just to help everybody understand and benefit from these changes. You're going to have your own stuff. That's obviously applicable to what you do, what your value is in the world, but what I suggest as a general principle is think about these tools as fixing your weaknesses, so that you can double down on your strengths and make sure that that's what you're actually marketing and offering to your clients. For example, social media. I'm a writer but I'm not good at short form. You know. Give me your 8000 word white paper and I'm your girl, but if I could write a tweet about it to encourage someone to download it or something. That's where I might turn to an AI, and it might be with a specific tool or it might be something to do with a social media scheduler itself. We're finding AI layers popping up everywhere now. You go into something like buffer or notion and all these tools are saying do you want to draw me to have a crack at that with the AI? And it's worth exploring what's there. You might find that it's unusable For some reason. Ai has now popped up in my newsletter production suite and it's offering to write subject lines for me Based on the content of the newsletter, and it's terrible. It's completely unusable. But sometimes it gives me a word or a phrase or a keyword or something, or there might be a few different attempts and I think I can use a bit of this one and a bit of that one and put them together so I can use it in that way. Also, image creation for social media. I'm not an image person. I can do stuff in Canva if I take my time on it, but for anything really original it's great fun anyway, playing around with things like mid journey. It's certainly not quicker than just finding the right free stock photo, but if, again, if it's something that you're interested in and maybe you think it's something that you're not necessarily good at, you can create a completely unique image really quite easily. I'm also using it for summaries and gisting. It's quite often writing involves a lot of research and journalism. You know I might get sent oh, here's a 60 page product brochure to review before you interview this subject matter expert and somehow glean a 700 word profile about them or something I'd love to say. I read that 60 page product brochure or all of the brochures that they send me and all the links. But sometimes it does make more sense to pass that through to an AI and say help me find points that are going to be most interesting, to ask the author of this paper about this particular subject or to pick out points that will be of interest to a certain audience, and that's really helpful. Obviously, again, whatever it comes up with, I will fact check back against the document to make sure it hasn't just completely made something up. It's going to make me look like a total idiot when I'm on the call, but it is really helpful in that summarizing. Another way it's useful is if you have data in that brochure as well, if you have tables, charts and things like that. You know there's a tremendous amount of information in there, but pulling out the story from it isn't always obvious. So I could say what's anomalous here, what's unexpected, what are the trends on the year on year data, and so and again it pulls out a statement. I go back and check it. It may or may not make sense, it may or may not be relevant, but it's just. It's almost like talking through it with somebody else to try and figure out a way of looking at information that can be really helpful. And that's even if what I'm dealing with is in English to start with, because, honestly, chat GPT is better than any automatic translation tool. I've used even for non work things. I put a medical scan report in it, you know as an MRI report in Spanish, and I would have had trouble making great sense of it even in English because I'm not a radiologist. But I put all the I'd literally just copied and pasted the whole report in it, not only translated it, it translated the advice. It was very careful to disclaim that it wasn't a doctor, it wasn't medically qualified to tell me anything, but then it it sort of included recommendations and questions that might want follow up and so on. It was just incredibly helpful. I wish I'd had that years ago, you know, when my daughter was having emergency surgery in a Spanish hospital and I was just completely lost with years long before and all I had was Google translate on the phone. To actually do this at the document and report level was so much more useful. So that's translating logic and algebra. As I said, I'm a words person, not a pictures person, definitely not a maths person. So I had a challenge recently where I was looking at a contact delivery platform and it had had three different payment tiers and it was so. You can use the platform for free, with no fixed charge, but it's going to charge you 5% of your sales for downloads. Or you can pay X a month and it will charge you 2% for downloads, or you can pay a higher fixed fee and then all your downloads are free. They're not capped with any kind of percentage top slicing, and I thought that's a really logical way of doing it. But how on earth do you know and I'm sure you know maybe back years ago, when I was studying maths and algebra at school, I could have figured out what equation to write, but I'm not a clue. So what I did was I wrote it as a paragraph into chat GPT and said this is, this is the situation. These are the different tiers. How do I decide between which one to go? For it did a whole load of maths, spat out a lot of formulas. I could check that theoretically if I've been in the mood, but then it gave me a paragraph or sentence or two at the end that said, in summary if your expected sales are going to be up to this level, then you should be on plan A. If it's going to be up to this level, then it will make more sense to be on plan B. And that was exactly what I needed, and there was no way I could do that, or it would have taken me a ridiculous amount of time in order to do that and get an answer that I could trust. And so I again spat it out sort of as soon as it could generate. It was literally seconds before I had that information. Ok, I know exactly what tier two opt for. Brilliant, the digital product themselves, by the way, was also designed a lot to do with chat GPT. Certainly, don't use it for the writing, but when it comes to formatting a beautiful ebook with images and charts pictures, perfect. It wasn't not to actually be to the automation tools built into a design platform. I get I could have spent a day and a half in Canva and it still would have been wonky, or they might have been bits missing or pages that didn't link up to index and things like that. Instead, boom done that to me is worth its weight, and even just finding the ideas for what to write about in the first place or to plan when I'm trying to come up with podcast themes, for example, once a week, is quite challenging when you're on your own. And whilst there are lots of things that I would like to think and talk about, sometimes it's helpful. If you enjoyed I think it was episode five, no, episode four when we talked about decision making as a freelancer and how it can be difficult when you're on your own. You haven't got somebody to just sit down and shoot the breeze with. Now, chatgpt isn't a board member, it isn't a manager, it isn't a coach, it isn't a boss, but it can act like a sounding board, provided you recognize its limitations, that it's not actually going to generate anything completely new. It can offer new ways of reflecting stuff back to you and it can offer you information. It's got access to that you might not have, and it has got access to quite a lot these days when it can look things up and it can read PDFs and so on, so it can be really helpful. I'll give you an idea associated with the Portugal Conference. We're doing a road trip. There were people and places that I wanted to see on the way, and I had the route from my side of Spain all the way to the opposite end of the peninsula planned out. But coming back, I had two days to make, a journey which came up on Google Maps as about eight hours, and I thought I've no idea where to stop on the way back, and so I thought about it, and then I phrased various prompts with chatGPT and ended up explaining that, okay, I had this eight hour drive. I wanted to chip off at least five, maybe six hours on day one. I wanted to stay at a small town or Pueblo, somewhere that wasn't a big city thanks been to them expensive, complicated, I'd much rather say somewhere smaller where we can park safely right outside the place, and for somewhere that's got some restaurants and a little bit of culture and history and has got a high availability of offices and accommodation, and it came up with two or three suggestions and they all sounded great. But again, has it hallucinated these? Has it made them up? Nope, checked out on the map and we picked one of them and we booked it somewhere I'd never heard of and still struggled to point it on the map. But luckily, google Maps knows that stuff. More automation, again, that we all rely on, and so, yeah, I've got a magical mystery tour. On the way back, I'll let you know how it goes and whether I would give chatGPT five stars or not for its recommendations. So lots of upsides, lots to think about what terms of ways to use it, and you would add your own to those lists, and maybe I've got time for questions at the end that will be really helpful to dig into. But we do need to recognise, then, that you might not be able to pay for all these things. If your job disappears and if what you do as a freelancer is something which can be prompted into a large language model or an image generator, then you need to rethink things quite urgently. You might need to change what you're doing or the way that you do it, the actual how you package that, how you offer it to your customers, your clients, what value add you bring to it as a human from your unique perspective and history. And you just need to figure this stuff out before someone tries to figure it out for you. And we also need to recognise that alongside that, as well as the ways it can make us more efficient at what we already do, there are brand new jobs and roles coming along. We hear a great deal about prompt engineering and that's what everybody's been trying to cram into their LinkedIn strap lines this year. Or take out remote worker, or what we were writing about a couple of years ago NFTs, metaverses, those keywords just cutting it now. So we're all going to be prompt engineers. I know relatively few people who are actually making a living doing prompt engineering, and they tend to be at an extremely high level in-house within startups who are actually developing this stuff. So what else can we do? There are lots more people who are learning how to apply this science in a more general business context and are learning to master it. You can call yourself a prompt engineer if you like, but there might be more roles around corporate storytelling, around brand strategy, the data science itself, of actually developing this stuff is. You know, this is some of the most sought-after roles in the world. If you've got those niche skills to offer, then you are amazingly prescient to have done the right courses and develop the right experience, because you can work for pretty much anywhere on the planet and from anywhere on the planet, people will give you whatever terms you actually want. There are also entry-level roles, particularly in AI training, I think, because obviously I've got a lot of concerns about replacement of entry-level roles in things like writing the stuff I started out on doing like product descriptions and things like that. That's all going to go logo design on Fiverr. But there are entry-level roles in training, in the human reinforcement that goes on within training these AI modules. In fact, some of this is very poorly paid and some of that's got to change. But even things like training in different languages, different intonations and practices. You see a number of those gigs coming up and the exact roles will continue to evolve and change, but there will definitely be tasks for humans to do, but the main opportunities out there are the things that we've got no idea about yet, and I think that's the thing, through all this state of flux that we need to keep in mind most firmly. Just like nobody at Nokia could have predicted Justi or TaskRabbit or all the ways that mobile phones could be used to create whole new categories of industry that didn't exist a decade ago, there are things we've got absolutely no idea yet. So all we can do is try and stay out ahead of what might be coming down the pie and remember to work hard on the differences between us and the algorithms, because that is our competitive edge. At the moment, we don't know what the future holds. We know what we need to move away from, but what we need to double down on is the bits of the machines we'll never be able to do. Being human, we need to add value in ways that AIs can never do, and that is about human touches, it's about synergies, it's about sensory elements, it's about our ethics and our values that we bring to decision making. It's about our experiences as a human, things that may go back years or decades in a particular industry, yes, but also in different industries and niches in life and travel, and the way all these things combine to give us perspectives that no large language model will ever have the cultural nuances, the appreciation of difference. Personalization and AI might be able to blend in different people's names and regionalization, but they will never understand what makes your custom a tick in the way that you do, because you can relate to them as a human and build a relationship with them. When I ask clients for testimonials on LinkedIn, I really hope they're going to talk about my amazing writing and bless them. Some of them do, but what I never asked them for, and what means the most to me when they talk about the work that I do for them, was they talk about being great to work with, about how I align with their objectives and help them achieve their goals, and they feel supported by me, and none of that is in my proposal when I'm pitching to create some content for them. But this is what differentiates me as a human. This is something they will not be able to plug in as a prompt and get the same results. They will not be able to have me saying to them actually, maybe we should do this differently, maybe we should think about this, or have you considered that? That idea coming down from your manager, maybe we could push back against that because it might not be appropriate for whatever reason, and we can have those conversations and you can basically provide value at a higher level, a more strategic level. This is what we're all going to have to do, and whatever you do for a living as a freelancer, you are probably doing this stuff already. I think it's really important to remember that you are providing this value. You're probably not recognizing it or even charging for it, as you should do, but if you're the chosen partner in creating something amazing with your client, whether that's a new program or something like a video or whatever, you are providing value above and beyond that creative process because of all these things, all these human elements, and that is what you will always be able to bring to the table, and no machine will. So what can we do? How can we prove this? How can we market this? I think it's really important that we stay up to date. We have to remember, as a freelancer, this is what we're good at. After all, we have the advantage over the momentum of big organizations struggling to cope with this stuff. They may have the budgets, they may have the personnel to devote to this, but if you're something like a big super tanker, your turning circle, your momentum is just so cumbersome and they can't react, they're not nimble in the way that we are as freelancers. We're paddling our own canoe and this nautical metaphor is going further than it should really but we can actually see which way the tides are taking us, which way the wind is blowing, and then we can steer or tackle. I don't really know much about boats, but whatever we do, I know it's better to move with the tide than against it, and that if you're small and agile, then you can be a lot more responsive to changes in the weather. So we can do this, we can pivot, we can keep changing and we can roll with the circumstances. We have to stay up to date on it. In order to do that, we have to keep talking to each other, sharing what's working, talking about prompts that work, learning from each other, finding our own path through all this, because there's an awful lot of content and information and publications coming out, because every week there are new startups, new apps. This stuff is getting funded left and right. We have to figure out what to pay attention to, what resources are appropriate for us at our level of technicality and our technical competence. There's no point trying to keep up with the actual science of it if that's not you, but we need to figure out how this impacts on business. So we must carry on with that. We need to also repackage or reframe what we do. This is something we should do anyway. When did you last review your LinkedIn strap line? When did you last review your portfolio, how it's presented and so on? I do this a lot because I'm a tech journalist and futurist and I have to make sure that I'm talking about the right things that I'm actually talking about. But I do know from a lot of people I work with who are trying to find new remote roles and trying to reposition themselves as freelancers and so on. There are people who say I haven't updated that for a few years and actually you could be doing yourself a massive disservice. So think about it now. Think about reframing what you do and what you're going to offer. What you may need to do as a human to continue to add value is actually upscale what you're offering. You are more than a content creator. You are a content strategist, and that's the difference that the clients will pay for. You are more than a logo producer. You're our design consultant. You're going to bring to that they could fire up an app and design a logo, but if they want to hire a human, it's because you bring a unique perspective to solving their problems and making that little, tiny logo somehow convey all of their brand values and everything else in a way that no machine can do. So you need to think about all the ways you add value and actually elevate that into your offering. Make sure it's clear what people get when they hire you. They're going to get something unique, based on the value that you can bring to the table that nobody else can. At the same time, you need to understand the limits of what you can do. We know what we're good at Freelancers, we're very good at that. We're playing to our strengths. We're not trying to compete with a pocket calculator. You know we're used to using tools to replace that. So we need to understand what's out there and we need to be very selective about what we use, how we use it to Actually really take away our weaknesses and uplift our strengths, because this is what's going to give us that competitive edge. This is what's going to differentiate us from the machines and from the people that rely too much on those machines, because a lot of that is going to happen. You know, we're going to see. It wasn't like when canvah came along that graphic designers all lost their jobs. They didn't, but some of them had to start using canva because their clients didn't necessarily want the level of standard that they got from somebody who Spent years at university studying how to use photoshop, one under the scale. There were people who still wanted that and wanted that kind of editing and so on. And there were other people who wanted a higher volume of production and it was if they weren't replaced by canva, the tool. Some of those designers were replaced by new entrants who were using canva and really understood it, and you had to get results quickly with it. So it's all about learning to use these tools to your advantage. And finally, lots of people have a real around the phrase personal branding. But One aspect of being human is you. It's me. We're not machines. This is not an AI talking to you now, it's a human being. Other, I mean, there are a, I can do video and things now. But the fact I'm doing video. You know, a year ago I made a damn fine living, mostly hiding behind a keyboard. I was very happy with that for a long time. Enough of my voice and what was unique about me Came through that I didn't need to do keynotes, I didn't need to do events, I didn't need to do video podcasting. That's all changed. So here I am. You know I'm standing here before you, bringing my humanity to the situation. I'm doing one to one work with clients in a way that I wasn't before. So you know, these are the ways now that we can stay in touch in 2023. I'm doing events like this, sharing my links with you so that we can stay connected, and this is all part of that reframing the human value that you're bringing, and it's it's changing the way that I work with individuals to. If you're listening to this, before the 23rd of October 2023, you still have time to join us for our autumn challenge in remote work Europe to come and level up your LinkedIn with us. What does that look like? Well, we're going to be working together as a cohort To really master LinkedIn when it comes to preparing your profile and your content posting strategy to optimize for new remote work opportunities. So this challenge isn't for you. If you're completely settled in, you're not looking for new work, you're not looking for new clients, you're not facing performance reviews or anything and you don't really use LinkedIn and you don't want to use it For everybody else. I would say if you think you've got any room for improvement at all in what you're doing on LinkedIn, please check it out. I'll put the link in the show notes. Come and see whether this is for you. You do need to commit a small amount of investment. You also need to commit a small amount of time on a regular basis for four weeks, because we're going to be working together To post every day. You can obviously prepare that ahead. You don't have to post in real time every day, but you do need to comment in real time and engage with other people in the cohort, because that's where the magic lies. We're going to be checking out each other's posts. We're going to be asking questions. We're going to be engaging properly. We're not just going to be working on any old great post comment which doesn't do anything. We're going to be really helping each other to boost our engagement, to show LinkedIn that the content we're creating is interesting and meaningful and helpful. And particularly for freelancers, linkedin is just an amazing platform for sharing what you know, for building your personal brand, for doing all of the things we've been talking about in this episode, to define yourself as a human, as a real person, somebody who can add value to a team, to a project, to any kind of creative endeavor. So if you think that you would like to do better at this, if you think this is something you might like to learn more about, then please check up the level out your LinkedIn Challenge, which you will find in the show notes to this episode, and maybe we'll be working together from the 23rd of October going into November To support and level up our LinkedIn together. Anyway, appreciate you listening to this last little bit and if you are listening to this out of time, if you've missed the challenge, then please don't worry. Come and join us at remote work Europe dot e you anyway, and then we can let you know the next time we're doing this, because we know it's going to be a success. We've done it before. Everybody benefited from it, everybody going to get deal. You even get a copy of our LinkedIn guide to keep as a souvenir and to guide your practice going forward. So it's definitely worth taking a look and, whenever you join us, best of luck with your LinkedIn, with your social media, in raising your game, staying one step ahead of the robots and doubling down on what makes you unique and human. Thank you for listening to the future is freelance podcast. We appreciate your time and attention in a busy world and your busy freelance life. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a fellow freelancer and help us grow this movement of independent entrepreneurs. If you rate and review the future is freelance in whichever app you're listening to right now, it really helps spread the word and that means we can reach more people who need to hear this message. Together, we can change the world and make sure the future is freelance. Don't forget you can check out all our back episodes from other seasons and learn more over at future is freelance dot XYZ. We're so grateful not only for our listeners, but for the contributions of our wonderful guests and for the production and marketing assistance of coffee like media. This is Maya Middle Miss, wishing you freelance freedom and happiness until our next show.