Fiverr Wants AI to Share Your Hustle—Fair or Foul?
A gig market such as Fiverr wants freelancers to train their AI with their own work and later automate jobs for them.
Fiverr declared the unveiling of its new plans to entice gig workers onto the platform with generative AI to their jobs at the event, which took place on Tuesday. The most ambitious program will enable freelancers who do voice-over, graphic design, and other tasks to train AI on their content and selling access to customers.
Fiverr Chief Executive Micha Kaufman explained that it was supposed to ensure that gig workers “earn their proper credit and pay while also giving them unprecedented tools for scaling their work.”
“This is about making our freelancers irreplaceable, not obsolete,” Kaufman said in a statement. “We built [these new features] to ensure creators remain at the center of the creative economy.”
Its stark impact was particularly felt by the gig market, meeting cheap and widely available generative AI technologies coming into the scenario of service delivery. A more recent report found that tools such as image generators and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have turned out to be competitive agents for fewer roles, where the brunt of ill effects is borne mostly by writers, programmers, and app developers.
These job may never come back. In an earlier, independent study of gig marketplace patterns over a nine-month period, the researchers concluded that the trend toward declining levels of freelancing has only accelerated over time.
Fiverr’s grand plan to tackle this issue is what they would call the “Personal AI Creation Model,” which would allow contractors to configure an AI model trained on their own past work-gather artworks, say, or programs-and price the usage. Fiverr says freelancers will own whatever work gets generated through their model, including contents like song lyrics and illustrations, marketing copy, and designs for digital ads.
“Buyers have full flexibility to choose between a freelancer’s AI-generated work, human-created work, or a seamless blend of both,” a Fiverr spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “Customers can instantly pay and download AI-generated assets or ask the freelancer for an additional edit. They can also contact the freelancer of an AI-generated work as a starting point for a project, as an example or inspiration, and ask for a specific service.”
When it also launches on Wednesday, at present, it will give access to “thousands” of “top, vetted” freelancers. Fiverr says it is using “advanced-language models” and “generative frameworks,” and “it won’t be free” to drive the capability. The Personal AI Creation Model costs $25 per month.
Gig workers may not feel they have much of a choice. Not participating can somehow put them in bad competition in a merciless industry. Many face economic insecurity and bills that stay unpaid while they lack benefits and protections specifically for full-time employees.
Fiverr stresses it will not use gig worker data to train in-house models (ones, like these, that might compete with them) and that the Personal AI Creation Model would be disable-able at any time.
The spokesperson added, “Creative work and the AI models freelancers train belong to them.” “Fiverr may collect aggregated, anonymized usage data solely to improve platform performance and user experience, but never to replicate or compete with freelancers’ creative work or services …
If a freelancer disables their AI Creation Model, they will have access to any content generated by the model and no one else will have access to it.”
Contractors on Fiverr using the Personal AI Creation Model will also be eligible to get Fiverr’s “Personal AI Assistant” ($29 monthly or included as part of Fiverr’s Seller Plus Premium plan), which is essentially a customer service chatbot fine-tuned based on contractors’ chats with clients. According to the assistant, which is customizable and can “provide actionable business insights”, it can take on “routine tasks”, entering a user’s reply in cases where the contractor is offline.
Because of the sensitive nature of some of these interactions, gig workers, however, might be wary about allowing the training on them.
To date, Fiverr has not indicated whether users will control which specific chats the Personal AI Assistant will use to fine-tune its performance.
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