Has Upwork lost the battle with AI chatbots, or won them?

Chasing paid pitches from the service provider … Can it be that Upwork is only encouraging the evolution of chatbots so as to encourage communication on its platform and holding out hope that a tool will expand the market for paid proposals?

Coincidence, inability to resist, or conspiracy?

You must have heard, that a Bank requires his Finance and assistance from Paid Subscribers and Contributions of Public Service Providers to forward his Offers to the Client.

So what could be easier, to use an extra widget you have to remove the manager, bring the offer to the customer ‘request’ in the way it will look the least usual for customer, the product will match 100% to developer’s profile, the answer will come to him in a few minutes and it will be technically.

AI models do this and more. Many chatbots arm themselves with such knowledge which has long been used. Some, such as https://gigrar.io, do so publicly. Others have their own resources developed based on some AI model and neural networks — natural language processing (including classification and vector spaces).

And what lies behind the curtains? Is help available, or more — Upwork collusion with a chatbot manufacturer? I attempt to find out.

The bare bones of all detective thinking is to find the motive. The financial enrichment involved in creating Upwork is the motive — natural pressure for service providers, many themselves on a broader scale slave to Upwork / Facebook, to begin such races, to deploy first AI, otherwise perish in their speed of response, their ‘know-how’ to the tech-novice customer.

As for the AI developer, demand for their products and paid subscriptions continues to increase.

So, can Upfork stop using generated texts by AI chatbots, and start injecting AI scans and detectors? Of course, yes. In 2024 already there are hundreds, maybe thousands, varying in quality, of AI detectors of generated texts, from Chat GPT 3.5 Turbo, to Chat GPT 4.0, to all kinds of forks and hidden development projects, with linguistic clue-flags on what parts of sentences, and phrasal units are more likely to be generated AI-style.

The problem then is not in the text, not in the AI-generated output, but in the fact that the bots will conjure up an idyllic proposal, an idyllic developer that actually turns out to be the exact contrary. Does that count as misleading? Maybe so.

Why haven’t the detectors been built yet? Why, as of 2024, are they still just an idea? That is the first question we as readers should ask.

Personal Experience

In an attempt to test AI Chat bots for Upwork on my task, I have to say the results are not great. One of Upstaff customers turned for rather a specific request, help estimate and develop social media giveaway project for Cardano Foundation, you know these crypto projects are evolving fast, and I decided to check what Upwork could give me.

De Jure, from the user point of view — Upwork has been degraded in the pursuit of paid bids from freelancers.

• Zero control over AI bots, or possibly encouraging. Upwork’s bread, after all.
• 85% bids are AI-generated. Scary…

May 2024, personal experiment: web scraping in Python for the Social Task Project. Bids will be left to speak for themselves: .

First cover letters. 85 per cent AI-generated: 100–90 per cent of AI texts. Received first 8 hours.

100% of AI-powered bidders ignored specific questions and replied with a standard MEETING LINK.

Something like this figures in most AI bids in the end:

1. Recopy requirements, adjust developer tasks to 1 to 1 match with requirements or at least close to, lastly spice up with few tech terms that AI can once again easily add since the tech stack is already provided in our task description.
2. Suggest a call.

Here is some retrospective observation

• 2015: 30%+ of Upwork developers never read & study project descriptions in depth.
• 2020: Agencies (not developers) are placing 40%+ of bids as is, and fewer are paying attention to the project details … Moreover, an overhead of 50–100% on price!
• 2022–23: Bid bots are introduced by agencies such as GigRadar.io at ZERO cost for the attention of the project managers. Bid letters are authorised copula derivatives of the project brief.

What’s next?

Will personal AI bots communicate with provider AI bots, and talk about people… using AI worker bots to fabricate components?