Study of generative AI’s impact wins Olin Award

The Olin Award, which honors faculty research with timely practical impact, was presented to two Olin professors for their look at the effect of generative AI on earnings of freelance creative workers.

Xiang Hui, assistant professor of marketing, and Oren Reshef, assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, won the 2025 Olin Award for their study, “The Short-Term Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Employment: Evidence from an Online Labor Market,” which was published in the journal Organization Science in September 2024. Their coauthor on the study was Luofeng Zhou of New York University.

Hui, Reshef and Zhou found that the introduction of generative AI writing tool ChatGPT and image creation tools DALL-E and Midjourney led to declines in both assignments and pay for freelance writers and designers on a widely used freelance platform.

While their study dealt with specific creative jobs, Hui said the technology has the potential to disrupt a wide range of industries.

However, he said employers shouldn’t look for ways to avoid the impact of the technology, but to embrace it.

Firms should be upskilling their employees to make sure that they can collaborate more effectively with generative AI technologies. This could include things like training employees to do better prompt engineering and other AI-related tasks.

—Xiang Hui

The Olin Award was established in 2007 by Richard Mahoney, Olin distinguished executive in residence and former chairman and CEO of Monsanto. Learn more about the Olin Award and its previous winners.