Khoury News
Q&A: How freelance workers can turn AI from a job threat into a job asset
Saiph Savage wants tech innovations to uplift workers, not crowd them out. Now, along with co-authors Pam Cerdeira and Liliana Savage, she's published a book showing gig workers how to turn AI's gains into their own gains.
Plenty of ink has been spilled about AI threatening to sweep independent creatives out of their jobs. But far less has been dedicated to helping freelancers critically engage with these new tools and to compete in a changing job market.
Saiph Savage wants to fix that.
The Khoury College assistant professor and Civic AI lab director recently published AI for Freelance Workers, a 260-page practical guide to help freelance workers understand how to integrate generative AI into their jobs. Crafted with the support of co-authors Pamela Cerdeira and Liliana Savage, the book provides plain language explanations and interactive exercises on topics like evaluating tools, automating repetitive tasks, and ethics. Readers can also earn Northeastern badges credentialing their education as they work their way through the book independently.
Khoury News sat down with Savage to learn more about the book. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Khoury News: Who is this book for?
Saiph Savage: If you are a knowledge worker and you want to start to think about how to integrate AI for different tasks, this book is definitely for you. If you’re a freelancer whose work is more location-based, this book can also help you, but a little bit differently. For example, let’s say you’re dog walking; there are certain skills that you still need, such as figuring out your rates, branding yourself, and reaching out to different clients. This book will help you, but we do focus on content creation, creativity, and deep research.
Why focus on this group of people?
Freelancers and gig workers are a population that is usually on their own, without institutional support from a company or an actual boss. They also have to figure out how to use these new technologies that are, at the same time, threatening to take away their jobs. Right now, there aren’t a lot of resources that gig workers can utilize to integrate AI into their workflow, so this book started to emerge from seeing that gap.
What are some of the most common or useful applications of AI for freelance workers?
It allows a single person to access capabilities that previously required an entire team. Freelancers can use AI to identify new clients, draft proposals, conduct market research, create marketing materials, analyze data, build websites, and manage administrative tasks. AI can also help workers learn new skills more quickly by acting as a personalized tutor and brainstorming partner. The freelancers who benefit most are often not those who simply automate their work, but those who use AI strategically to expand the range of services they can offer and to spend more time on the creative, interpersonal, and high-value aspects of their business.
What is the biggest resistance to generative AI that you see among freelancers?
They don’t want to lose their competitive advantage. They’re worried that if they start to share creative ideas with the AI, the content is going to be used to train the AI and then be given to a competitor. We talk about it in the book — one solution is using local generative AI tools, so you know your work is not being shared into the model of a company where you have no control over what happens to the data. We also have sections about evaluating commercial tools with an eye to data privacy, and on critically selecting what data to share with an AI tool.
Before you explore its applications, you spend the first half of this book on how AI works. Why is it important that freelancers understand how AI works and not just how to use it?
As we were creating the book, we were also testing it out on real students that were utilizing the content for themselves. Originally, the book was just AI in the workplace, but when we started to teach about it, we realized that if they don’t understand how the technology is working, it’s harder to question and correct it. Our belief was that if they could understand what is happening with the AI, they could integrate it into their work better, because they have the background to say, “Wait a second, I might be seeing biased data here — I might be seeing a hallucination.”
Some workers also resist AI due to concerns that it further divides and exploits the labor market. Why might those workers want to engage with this book?
I believe that for gig workers to organize — for example, to push for better labor conditions in their workplace, especially when things get automated — they need to understand the technology. How are they going to negotiate which technology should not be in which workflow if they don’t understand the technology? I believe that by educating workers, they’re more empowered to raise their voices and concerns.
It’s clear that you don’t buy the idea that AI will replace independent knowledge workers. Why not?
As I see it, AI is creating new types of jobs. For example, AI can create interfaces; some employers say, “Well, now I don’t need designers.” But the interfaces that AI is creating have a lot of errors, so you do need designers who can use their deep design knowledge to correct those systems.
For another example, airplane pilots often train without the tools to navigate autonomously; then, while they’re on the job, they start to utilize those tools. New types of tasks started to emerge in their jobs; maybe having better self-correction lets them spend more attention on handling emergencies. It wasn’t that their jobs disappeared; their jobs are now different. I think it’s similar to what happens with AI. We really need CEOs to understand that integrating AI doesn’t mean that you can now have a smaller workforce; it’s more that you’re going to have other types of work.
You were testing this curriculum in the High-Tech Career Reentry Path Project program, which works with formerly incarcerated workers up against more obstacles than most. How did they respond to this content?
It became pretty empowering. We saw them jump from “I do not identify as a tech person” to “Wow, I’m a tech person — I’m creating these data analyses, these interfaces, and I’m empowered to modify them if needed.” Since they understood the concepts behind it, they were not just grabbing what the AI was giving them; they felt empowered to polish and improve the work.
So certain tasks like invoicing, scheduling, and writing cover letters can be automated with AI, and that frees up workers’ time. What more “robot-proof” skills should workers put that time into instead?
Through our interviews, one thing that emerged was that freelancers didn’t want to completely automate conversations with their clients. Sometimes when clients realized they were talking with a bot, they’d get turned off and go away. So that type of social interaction, connecting with other humans, is still very important.
AI for Freelance Workers can be pre-ordered on the Khoury College website.
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