How Aussies can cash in on the increase in AI-related jobs, make an extra $10K a year
Aussies can earn an extra $10,000-plus a year by embracing new artificial intelligence tools – no tech qualification or experience needed. See how.
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Everyday Australians can turn curiosity into cash, with the potential to earn an extra $10,000-plus a year by embracing new artificial intelligence tools.
No tech qualification or experience is needed – and early adopters are already starting side hustles or leveraging increased productivity to ask for a pay rise.
Data from freelance job marketplace Freelancer.com reveals the number of AI-related jobs on the platform increased 20.6 per cent in the first three months of the year.
Demand for generative AI skills specifically – using applications such as ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion – more than quadrupled.
These fetched an average of $591 per project, depending on the skill set.
For example, work with text-to-image tool Stable Diffusion averaged $904 compared to $551 for work with chat bot ChatGPT.
But Freelancer chief executive Matt Barrie said almost all white collar jobs could now incorporate AI so freelancers were also leveraging AI skills with projects such as copywriting and social media marketing.
He said Australians could easily make an extra $10,000 a year by taking on a side hustle.
“That’s incredibly straightforward and easy to do,” Mr Barrie said.
“That’s only 20 jobs a year and maybe even less – the average social media marketing job pays about $1200 so it may even be 10 projects or less over the course of a year.
“The key skill to learn is how to talk to the machine.
“If you know how to formulate the question, the answer is instant and easy.”
Mr Barrie suggested doing research and free courses online to refine skills in prompt writing for AI.
For example, they could learn the terminology around colour manipulation and lens types, and include these phrases in their prompts to improve outputs when creating AI art through text-to-image generators.
Melbourne’s Julia Iliushchenko, 38, is a full-time mother of two and has been creating AI art since text-to-image tool Midjourney V3 was released last July.
She started her Etsy shop, Grait Prints, in September and sells “a few artworks every month”, with prices typically starting at $30 per print, depending on size.
“I love AI, it’s so endless for imagination,” she said.
“It wasn’t difficult to get started, I was just fascinated.
“I tried any possible styles and prompts combinations.”
There is also money to be made in prompt writing itself.
People who have created effective prompts can sell these as templates on marketplaces such as PromptBase to AI users wanting a headstart with their own projects.
Each download is priced around $5 and the seller keeps 80 per cent, so a line or two of text downloaded 2500 times could generate $10,000 in passive income.
PromptBase founder Ben Stokes said most sellers were from Europe or the US, but there were also about 500 Australians on board.
The top seller already had more than 4200 sales.
Mr Stokes said although writing prompts had enabled anyone to be creative and build simple, interesting projects through natural language, users with specific knowledge typically produced the best prompts.
“(If you are writing a prompt) that helps summarise legal documents, you are probably going to have a better prompt if you have a little bit of knowledge in that area,” he said.
Starting a side hustle is not the only way to cash in on AI, though.
Career mentor and Small Business Women Australia founder Amanda Rose said workers who used AI tools such as ChatGPT to be more productive were also well positioned to ask their boss for a pay rise.
“They need to track it for four weeks – track the benefits and put a monetary value on it,” she said.
“It might be that an activity that usually took five hours now takes you one, or you say ‘I am now doing all of these extra things’.
“(You could effectively) be adding a role (to the team for free) so it could be $40,000 a year that you have added to what you are doing.
“Put a value on it, take it to your boss.”
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