The Gun Is Winning and Most People Haven't Seen the Gun

There's a thread on r/freelance right now — posted today, February 29, a date that only exists every four years as if to mark the truly strange moments — titled "Impossible to find a job." The replies are what you'd expect: rates collapsing, clients ghosting, Upwork flooded, the same copywriting gig that paid $500 now getting 300 bids at $15.

The thing nobody in the thread says, because why would they, is that most of them have probably never used ChatGPT.

That's the part that keeps catching me. The macro is legible — you can see it in the job boards, in the pricing pressure, in the way clients now explain what they want with a specificity that suggests they already ran it through something and found the output disappointing. The downstream effects are everywhere. And yet when you look at actual usage numbers, actual adoption among actual everyday people, the number is small. Most people are not using this technology. Most people are being affected by this technology.

That gap is the weird thing.

It's not new for a technology to harm people who don't use it — cars wrecked the horse economy without asking whether stablehands had subscriptions. But the speed here is different, and so is the invisibility. The stablehand could see the car. Could hear it. Could form an opinion. The freelance writer getting undercut right now may have a vague sense that AI is somewhere in the story, but the mechanism is diffuse enough to feel like market forces, like bad luck, like maybe their portfolio just needs work.

Meanwhile a small cohort of people who did open the tab and type into the box have radically altered the supply side of an entire category of labor — not because they're smarter or more driven, but because they got curious on a random Tuesday.

The demo I was working on is done. I can chase the rabbit holes now. And I keep ending up here: the effects are structural and the adoption is still shallow, which means we haven't seen anything yet, which is either exciting or terrible depending on whether you're the person who opened the tab or the person who didn't know there was a tab.