This mass plagiarization crisis has only deepened and complicated since, leaving educators, administrators, and students to grapple with how to construct, enact, and enforce AI policies at school. I should know: My partner is a professor at a university, and dealing with students who use AI to cheat on assignments has become a core part of her job, and an endless source of frustration.

But cheating on coursework is only the tip of the iceberg. Universities have signed huge contracts with AI companies, which have been driving hard into the space, while K-12 public schools have adopted AI tools, sometimes disastrously. (Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s home was raided as part of an FBI investigation into a multimillion dollar deal with an educational chatbot developer that failed within months). Such deals, like the California Statue University system’s $17 million partnership with OpenAI, or Ohio State’s policy to mandate all students learn AI fluency, are top-down initiatives that have left many educators working in the classroom backfooted. Teachers and students alike are being encouraged from all angles to adopt AI products, setting up new arenas for tension and conflict, and posing serious questions about the future of instruction.

AI has indeed flooded the profession, impacting tutelage, administrative work, counseling, testing, and beyond. And it’s already had serious ramifications for labor; as in many other trades, education jobs are being deskilled, degraded, and even lost outright to clients and bosses embracing AI systems. Librarians and tutors are watching as administrators and edtech companies embrace AI tools as a means of cutting their work hours. IT and HR professionals in the education space are competing with AI products on the market and speeding up work to match their output. Educators of every stripe worry that quality instruction and critical thinking skills are taking serious hits as AI provides an easy, if frequently incorrect, route to an answer. And ominously, critical AI programs are being cut just as universities turn to embrace chatbots. One instructor at the University of California at Irvine, Ricky Crano, wrote in to share his story of being laid off from a job organizing a series of seminars that examined the tech industry—just around the time the school was promoting its proprietary chatbot, ZotGPT.

Some educators are fighting back: The American Association of University Professors, a union representing academic workers, for instance, has called for faculty control over all AI decisions as a matter of policy, and AI has become a battleground in contract negotiations and campus life. Graduate student unions, librarians, and activists are organizing against administrations that have rushed to deploy AI.

I’ve heard stories like these, and many more. Last year, 404 Media ran a great roundup of stories told by teachers, and how they’re struggling with AI in the classroom. So with this, the fifth installment of AI Killed My Job, we’ll hear not just from teachers, lecturers, and instructors, but from education workers across the field—private tutors, student athlete coaches, librarians, HR employees, essay graders, and edtech workers—who have all had their jobs transformed by AI. These stories, some of which may sound familiar a few years into the AI boom, and many which will not, help paint a fuller picture of just how the technology has already impacted some of our most crucial institutions.

If your job has been impacted by AI, and you would like to share your story as part of this project, please do so at AIkilledmyjob@pm.me. The next installments will aim to cover healthcare, journalism, and retail and service jobs.

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Before we proceed, I want to share word of a project that might be of interest to readers. The Fund for Guaranteed Income is a nonprofit that researches and enacts, you guessed it, guaranteed income projects, and they’re working on “a support program for workers whose jobs or income have been affected by AI, designed with direct input from impacted workers,” FGI head Nick Salazar tells me. He asked if I might extend a call for participants with readers, and I’m happy to do so:

• If AI has changed your work, you can share your story anonymously at aicommonsproject.org. Submissions directly shape what the program will look like, and anyone who shares will be first to know when it launches.

And now, AI Killed My Job: Educators.

This story was edited by .

I don’t have any reason to believe my employer will not replace me totally with AI

Tutor at a community college

I work at a community college as a tutor to students in ESL, English, and—more broadly—writing for other courses like major midyear essays for students in other classes or those working toward high school equivalency tests. My hours were halved after Trump DOE cuts, so like many other workers I was already in a precarious position.

It’s a fairly low-pay job that takes a lot of emotional labor, especially considering many of our students have not only been failed by the education system but are often literally hungry, might not have heat or AC, are refugees from war-torn countries, and/or are facing a constellation of other life challenges that make it very difficult to succeed. Many of my students survive on gig work and/or Amazon warehouse jobs. It didn’t surprise me when some of these first-year English students started using AI for their papers.

One particularly memorable student brought in her paper followed by the AI version written out paragraph to paragraph in her notebook. She wanted me to help her merge them. ChatGPT made a reference to a movie anecdote that doesn’t exist. This was a personal essay. This was early on—when the AI was so shitty, I sort of believed I could convince her of the value of her own story and voice—which I attempted to do for an hour. We really bonded, it felt like a win for the day, and then she had to go work at Amazon.

A few weeks later, she brought in an AI outline that made no sense and she could not explain which made brainstorming for her paper impossible. Her professor had given her an A [on the outline]. Shortly after, she brought in an AI-written paper that also made no sense and pulled from real sources, but ones that were not reputable and with references to quotes that did not exist. Other students had also begun to bring in oddly perfect personal essays.

The focus was frequently how to personalize them, to try to inject a tiny bit of who they are into the bland product AI had spat out. Sometimes I just couldn’t tell whether it was their own work or not.

That’s really at the core of the issue for me: This was one of my favorite jobs because I felt like I was doing a good thing, I saw students make wildly awesome improvements as writers over the months, and we built real relationships. I cannot express enough how important the human connection is at my job: these are people who rarely get the support they need and deserve. I’ve had students break down crying, I’ve talked one off the ledge. I spent a year decoding the insanity that is a green card application for another. One of the biggest barriers to success where I work is just signing in—basic tech literacy. If/when we switch to AI tutors, the lack of accessibility is one of many issues that is invisible to people who don’t do our job every day.

In the past when my students left, I had faith that they could succeed, that they’d really learned something—namely how to think critically and value their own story. We were able to work together because there was a basic foundation of trust. That trust is gone now, replaced by suspicion and frustration. It feels like my new job is how to help students cheat better.

At our latest professional development training, we were told that the college was piloting Khanmigo, an AI “learning assistant” (lol) for math. We were told to write down all of our fears about AI or in the chat and then push them aside. We listed out the fear of job loss the most, followed by loss of critical thinking skills, privacy issues, feeding a machine that steals our ideas and churns out mediocrity…Many tutors went out of their way to include links to sources like MIT. They also pointed out that AI had yet to improve productivity or make a profit. Our supervisors literally did not address any of this. The message was clear: *AI is here to stay and we have to adapt.*

We were told not to question whether students are using AI, to in fact assume they are, and tutor them on how to better use it. The “use cases” my supervisor included had students choosing between different AI rewrites of passages for whichever one is better and why. We’re supposed to encourage them to think critically about what AI spurts out. We’re also supposed to pretend that this type of tutoring makes any sense when students can just ask for suggestions, click apply all, and get on with it—or, as we know many do—just drop the assignment prompt into AI, mix it up in a few different models, and then ask it to dumb itself down a bit to sound more like them.

I don’t have any reason to believe my employer will not replace me totally with AI even though my supervisor insists they won’t. I know a machine can technically do my job and that AI is already making my job obsolete considering students don’t have to write anymore. My college has chosen to hire numerous adjuncts part-time, limiting how many full-timers they have, and I am one of them. I ultimately ended up taking fewer hours than they offered and contacting some old freelance writing clients to spend more time away from there. It feels like rejecting them before they reject me. My supervisor is giving us the “option” to lead AI workshops and said to think about it. I know the right answer is to say yes. I won’t.

—Lauren Krouse

[We followed up with Krouse before publication. She told us she had quit.]

We’re expected to accept work that is clearly not the student’s as if it were

Professor

I’m a professor in the California State University system, which was recently profiled due to its stated desire to be the “largest AI-driven university in the world.” I want to talk about academic misconduct.

Academic misconduct is when students pass off work that they haven’t done as their own. It used to be “when students pass off other people’s work as their own,” but now, students simply plug exam questions into a chatbot and copy and paste what it spits back to them. While academic misconduct has always been a problem on campuses, before AI, marshaling your evidence and presenting it to the student would trigger a confession, which could then become an opportunity to teach.

Now, one of two things happens: either the student confesses but doesn’t change their behavior, or they double down and insist that it’s their work despite the evidence you present. Students are convinced that the AI cannot be detected, and they refuse to listen when you show them the tells, insisting that it was their own work. I had a student make reference to three issues that were extremely relevant to the exam question but so far outside the realm of what we studied that the only way they would know to talk about it is through extensive self-study that would be reflected in their post-exam recollection. When the student had no idea what their own exam was talking about, but they insisted that they had written the exam answer, I was left relatively nonplussed.

I’m new to the CSU, so I haven’t had occasion yet to send a student over to the formal investigatory process. But in general, my experience at other institutions suggests that without a confession, administrators are loathe to impose any penalties for academic misconduct - and the mere fact of referral means that the student will be on guard against less formal sanctions (and in fairness, it would not be inappropriate to call those “retaliation,” so arguably the student is correct). But this means that when a student refuses to take responsibility for their work, that there’s usually simply no consequences whatsoever - and we’re expected to accept work that is clearly not the student’s as if it were.

There’s also the problem of mixed messages. While we as faculty are free to ban the use of AI from our classes, the university system is sending multiple messages that these are good and useful tools for students. Students are given a subscription to a bespoke ChatGPT bot for the university, and there are constantly workshops and continuing education sessions about “how to use AI for [this thing we have to do].” Combining the administration’s aggressively pro-AI stance with the easy availability of tools means that faculty protests usually fall on deaf ears - even after we show students the complete and utter uselessness of the tools for the purposes they want.

And our students are, frankly, primed to be the targets of AI flimflam. The CSU isn’t an open-admissions university but it is an access institution. This means that we admit students who are at-risk of failing out of higher ed, either because of lack of preparation, lack of resources, or lack of bandwidth due to work or care obligations. This means that a lot of our students struggle with the basic kinds of tasks that we assign them. The promise of an automatic task completer is deeply attractive, and the background and training of our students doesn’t really equip most of them to adequately assess the claims of the AI pitch.

I haven’t been fired and replaced by AI; we have a strong and militant union that is aggressively pushing back against the use of AI to replace faculty. But bargaining is concessions, and it’s not clear whether the administration will be willing to give ground on this issue given how strongly they’ve staked the institution’s future on it. The job has changed due to AI, and combined with all of the other assaults on American higher education, I don’t know if my career will remain on its current track long enough for me to get tenure.

—Anonymous

My university used to WorkDay’s AI to streamline me out of job

Adjunct professor and HR worker at a university

I worked in HR for a university, handling the paperwork for our adjunct professors. Contract hires. And I was an “HR Partner” in addition to my role as an office coordinator.

Anyway, I’m an adjunct myself. Or I was. I taught writing, one quarter per year. A one-credit class. Amounts to about $700. Before taxes.

I took a job at my alma mater, and when it faced financial turbulence, the university responded by laying off 40% of the full-time faculty. They told me I’d be extra busy now, what with all the new adjuncts coming in (cheap labor).

And I was.

The day that HR called me into the Dean’s office to lay me off, I asked them a simple question:

“Who is going to work with all of the adjuncts—the people I handle paperwork and onboarding for every quarter? The people I talk to every day, helping them sort out their classes, keys, syllabi, schedules, and miscellaneous concerns?”

“Oh-oh-oh, WorkDay will do that!” the HR rep told me with a smile. WorkDay is an AI platform for streamlining work. It certainly streamlined mine.

—Jason M. Thornberry

Refusing to use Copilot cost me my job

IT professional at a university

For the past 2 years I’d been working as an IT Professional II at TAMU AgriLife, an organization under Texas A&M University that conducts research and programs related to agriculture and life science. In November 2024, I was moved from the department I’d been working as an IT Professional at since March 2023 to a new department under a new manager. This new manager made it clear from the start that he was obsessed with generative AI, telling me that his department was the place to be if I wanted to learn how to use gen AI. I, however, have never been a fan of generative AI, and had been working my job well for 2 years without it. As soon as I arrive in this new department, this new manager tries to subtly push me into using ChatGPT, Copilot, and Grok to do my work of helping others with technology problems, but every time I was asked I politely declined.

Then, in late March 2025, I had an employee evaluation with this new manager. As soon as the evaluation begins he starts heavily trying to push me into using generative AI, saying it’s “the way of the future” and that “everyone who doesn’t use it will be left behind.” When I tell him I have no interest in using AI, he says that I “better start” or I’ll “have a hard time finding or keeping a job”. He then tells me he’s going to get me a Copilot license, and that I must take a training course to use Copilot. I tell him that even if I take a Copilot course, I won’t use it in my work and thus buying a Copilot license for me would be a waste of company money. The employee evaluation continues, and he keeps trying to pressure me into using AI, but I continue to decline.

Then, on the following Monday in early April, he sends me a message that he’s gotten me the Copilot license (despite me telling him not to) and tells me to pick a day to take Copilot training. I reiterate to him that I have no interest in using Copilot and try to continue doing my job, but he sends more messages to me in an attempt to try and make me take the Copilot lessons. That same day as I am working, one of my coworkers suddenly gets up from his desk and starts yelling excitedly to our manager about how he had just used generative AI to make a musical about “an impregnation ninja who fertilizes every woman on the planet.” My manager responds by laughing it off like it was nothing. As soon as I get the chance I have a private conversation with my manager to tell him that I have problems with my coworker using generative AI to make explicit musicals in the workplace, but this manager says that this coworker “has always been kind of a degenerate” and that “I’ve told him to stop, but the AI is a tool, so it’s up to him how to use it”...meaning this has happened before, and he’s done nothing about it.

The week continues until Friday, when after asking me again if I’ve signed up for the Copilot training and I reiterate that I haven’t, this manager sends me an email saying that if I don’t take the Copilot training I will either be disciplined or potentially terminated. At this point I’ve had enough, so I call Human Resources and the boss of our IT company and report everything I just told you to them, and that my manager is trying to force me to use generative AI but isn’t doing anything about another employee making explicit works during work hours. Unfortunately though, both the boss and HR try to split this into 2 separate issues; the boss says that he will talk to my manager about allowing a worker to get away with making explicit works at the office, but that this manager can make me use AI if he wants and if I don’t like it I should “choose between my morals or my job”; and HR says they will wait to take action until after the boss talks to my manager.

The following Monday, during the second week of April, the boss of our company does have a private meeting with my manager, but I was never informed what was said at that meeting. I assume that the boss told my manager to back off from trying to force me to use AI, because this manager doesn’t mention the Copilot training courses at all for the next several weeks. Thus, I return to working my job and try to move past this whole fiasco.

Things settle down for the next few weeks, until April 23, 2025. On that day, this manager waits until everyone except for me and him are out of the office, and then suddenly asks if I took the Copilot training (after having not mentioned it in the past few weeks). When I say no, he tells me that the time for the Copilot training in April has already passed, and that because I missed the training I will have to either resign in 60 days or be terminated. I ask about taking the Copilot courses in May that were also being offered, but he doesn’t accept and reiterates that I have to choose resignation or termination. I decided to resign.

—Caleb Polansky

My students genuinely do not understand why they shouldn’t use AI

University Lecturer

I’m a lecturer in Psychology at a large private college in Dublin. At a recent meeting (zoom—of course!) our Data Analytics and Reporting manager asked what we all thought about getting AI to mark our students’ work, the things that couldn’t already be turned into auto-marked online MCQs etc, like long form essays. I pointed out that we are paid to mark the work we assign (it’s actually my least favourite part of the job, but that’s not the point) and asked if we could expect a reduction in pay as a result. I was told “We aren’t going to talk about that.” I should train the AIs to replace me as a marker but should not even be so bold as to wonder what effect that will have on my pay.

Obviously, students are using AI to write the assignments anyway. The idea that we can catch this kind of plagiarism effectively is pure fantasy. Increasingly my students genuinely do not understand why they should not use AI anyway... what is the point of ‘wasting’ days researching and writing an essay when the AI version will be as good or even better?

My question now is if AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?

This whole profession never really recovered from powerpoint, this is just the nail in the coffin.

—Anonymous

The majority of the students learn nothing

Private computer science tutor

When the pandemic hit in the Spring of 2020, it was a catastrophe for students suddenly forced into remote learning, as professors were blindsided and desperately improvising… Begrudging acceptance of online education was indisputably bad for learning, but it did create demand for online tutors, and that has been my job since Covid.

The majority of students are behind on an assignment, and just want answers that will get them a decent grade. As a good tutor, my job was to try to redirect that desire toward actual learning, not just do their work for them. Then came the large language models. I got to watch some lower-performing students use them, and it was deeply concerning. They would type (or copy-paste) a description of the code they wanted into a coding environment, then accept whatever completion emerged so long as it compiled. If it did not, they would try again, with no ability to understand or correct the generated code. No learning took place.

This past year I have seen far fewer students, as the casual, lazy ones who just wanted a B-level answer can now often get one from a coding LLM, since homework problems are well-represented in the LLMs’ training sets. They don’t understand (or care) that the point of their assignments is not to create more solutions to homework problems, but to teach them fundamentals of programming and computer science, and there is no one there to gently correct them. The less mercenary students still look for tutoring, and they are more fun to work with, but they are a minority, and unfortunately there are not enough of them.

—Sean

My colleagues have abandoned their values to board the AI hype-train

Librarian at an R1 research university

It is pretty understood in my department that we are opposed to AI in the research process but as soon as we leave our office suite, we are met by many AI advocates. I actually signed up for this substack after I had a disagreement with a professor while I was in the middle of teaching a session for one of their classes and felt like I needed to learn more detailed information on the way AI works. I told students that ChatGPT is not a search engine, and while I was technically wrong in that it has web browsing capability, I was correct in that it is terrible. Unfortunately for me in that moment I have integrity and can say things like “I don’t know that for sure so I will cede that to you and look into it more.”

Pettiness aside:

I think the change is coming fast. Every day there are new conference presentations and papers on why librarians should be using AI and how they can do it. Academic librarians are guilty of always trying to “prove our worth” and get on board with every new trend regardless of whether or not we should. And in the case of AI we absolutely should not. It goes against the core values of the profession as stated by the American Library Association: “Access, Equity, Intellectual Freedom and Privacy, Public Good, and Sustainability.” It violates all of the tenets of the ACRL Frameworks for Information Literacy. It is shocking to me how fast some of my colleagues have abandoned their stated values to get on board the AI hype-train. I get a bitter taste in my mouth every time I think about the ones that were giving land acknowledgements (maybe still are) and now champion AI.

At my university AI is being pushed from the top down. Leadership has openly stated that workers who do not use AI will get left behind. If there is organized resistance on campus, I haven’t found it outside my department. I know that there are many in the profession who are opposed, however.

I am not sure if I can say specifically that it is changing the way that patrons are experiencing the library. I would not be surprised if it was, though. I do believe it is changing the way that patrons perform research and increasing the likelihood that they will be satisfied with “good enough” or even just “well, it’s something.” I have heard students defend the position that chatbots have access to 80% of the internet and are gaining more every day. I don’t know where this belief comes from other than well crafted propaganda?

But I do want my last point to be this: I don’t blame people, especially students, for using these tools when they don’t know better. We live in a hell world with increasingly limited time for ourselves. ChatGPT and LLMs like it claim to offer them some of that time back. The way that the bots “talk” to them is with a sense of sureness and like the bot is their friend. It doesn’t offer critique of what the user does, it doesn’t challenge them. And while those things might feel comforting, it is cheating them of real learning.

Teaching is a relational process. Student and teacher should both learn from one another and with that comes friction. LLMs will do anything possible to eliminate that relational friction to maintain the comfort of users. So, what’s more appealing? The librarian telling you no, or the chatbot giving you all the “answers?”

—Anonymous

AI training programs are failing student athletes

Assistant Strength and Conditioning coach at an NCAA Division-3 University

I currently work as a part-time, hourly wage, no benefits, assistant strength and conditioning (S&C) coach at an NCAA Division-3 university. My hiring as a part-time assistant already represents a reduction in staffing, at least partially due to AI use. I struggle to get even adequate part-time hours, which may result in the future elimination of the position or my inability to keep the position. This is largely due to direct and indirect effects from AI use.

We use a virtual training platform to deliver strength training programs to the university’s hundreds of student-athletes. This offers several ostensible positives. Ideally, we write training programs in the app that students can access on their smartphones, which includes short gif exercise demonstrations and allows them to enter training data. Streamlining training program delivery can allow us to spend more time coaching and interacting more meaningfully with athletes versus writing the program in Excel, emailing/printing it, and spending most of our contact time reminding athletes how to read it and what the exercises are. The app guidance can help students achieve the training on their own when away from our coaching for various unavoidable reasons.

The app also facilitates a lazier and labor-cutting approach with their range of semi-responsive AI training programs. Provide some demographic details, such as sport, primary competitive season, gender of athlete, beginner/advanced, and any specific equipment exclusions, and the AI will generate as mediocre of a training program as one would expect of such broad inputs and limited knowledge of the actual humans and environment. In the typical AI use case, this is better than literally nothing, and it can receive human intelligence tweaks to go from mediocre to adequate. There is no source info available as to how the AI designs the program, namely, what are the purported differences between sports, genders, beginner/advanced, etc. that they are using to program? A capable human coach would be responsible for answering these questions. I’ve made some comparisons between close options, say male/female or baseball/softball or women’s/men’s lacrosse and found either no differences or arbitrary changes that I would be unable to explain.

In reality, we do not use time saved by AI programming to spend more time coaching and interacting with athletes and colleagues. We do not actually see all athletes or teams. Several teams do not participate in S&C at all. These sports often have team accounts set up on the AI program, but don’t know about them or use them. Even if they did, the programs are so clearly inadequate that I can’t in good faith recommend that they use it without modification. Some athletes do S&C on their own individually, while some sport coaches handle it themselves without us. We’ve ceded this ground as a staff rather than use time saved from programming to develop relationships with coaches and athletes who don’t inherently engage with us. This especially includes athletes and teams who aren’t traditionally enthusiastic about S&C: more women’s teams, endurance or more “niche” sports, and sports with chronically poor win-loss records.

I build my own training programs in the app and use the app only as the delivery platform. This improves the quality of my training programs, because I’m writing them for the actual humans in front of me, in our actual shared environment, considering their actual sport and academic schedules, instead of the AI estimations of those key factors. I feel that my relationship with the athletes is better, as we’re talking about the training and I’m taking their feedback and we’re working with it together and we see each other’s collected invested efforts. I try to communicate with sports coaches on our shared teams, to mixed results. Some appreciate the collaboration and it has improved my work and deepened my relationship with the team. Others seem to wonder why I’m bothering them. A human-intelligence approach also increases my working hours so that I can actually get close to a full 20-hour week. I would have more like 5-10 hours of “floor time” (ie. in the gym with athletes) only if I followed the head coach’s example to only use prompt-and-tweak AI programming.

I have seen numerous instances of poor quality training due to our use of the AI programs. Here are a few significant examples:

• The AI programs are automatically set up to change exercises every 4 weeks. One team changed exercises during the week of their conference championship semi-final game. Sore legs were had by all, as changing exercises is known to increase muscle soreness and the new exercises were more intense. They played the semi-final that weekend to a highly fatiguing overtime win and then lost in the final on the following weekend.

• The AI calendar follows pre-established program pathways from one physical focus quality to the next (eg. muscle size, strength, power, etc.). This resulted in one team doing a maximum strength phase (heavy weights, slow speed, high fatigue) during the final weeks of their competitive season, unadjusted for their game schedule. Many athletes simply did not follow the program.

• The AI only sets a single competitive season, so it’s immediately inappropriate to use for athletes who have two competitive seasons over a year. Some sports have a split season of both fall and spring competition, either equally weighted or with one slightly prioritized over the other. Athletes on at least one team did high-fatigue hypertrophy (muscle-gaining) training during their spring in-season phase of faster pace, lighter bodyweight, more readiness-dependent performance demands.

Athletes often no-show to sessions with the provided reason that they can do it on their own with the app. Coaches often cancel sessions for the same reason. Even if following an app was a direct substitute for in-person participation with qualified staff, this reduces our role to “programmers” instead of teachers. Of course, as a staff we aren’t even “programming” because the AI program is.

Cutting in-person time eliminates our ability to provide actual instruction of physical movement, develop relationships, and create a quality team training environment. We know that these factors are actually what improve training outcomes, creates a rewarding athlete experience, and benefits life beyond immediate sport performance, not toiling away in isolation guided by an app. Session cancellations, reduced attendance, and low communication also reduce my enjoyment of the job, working hours, and income.

—Anonymous

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AI is causing the most damage in student learning and skill development

Academic

I’m an academic. I work in the UK but I spent a decade in higher education in the US and was tenured before moving across the Atlantic. I didn’t have a lot of AI to deal with before my current role, obviously ChatGPT kind of started this trend.

Firstly, MetaAI has stolen every last thing I’ve ever published. Academic publishing doesn’t bring in a lot of money. My book royalties are 2-5% and my articles bring in nothing other than prestige (whatever that is). Academic journals, I should add, are very expensive to access as you may already know. I see nothing from that of course, it’s essentially free labor that my institution sort of expects me to complete but only in vague terms. Certainly if I don’t publish, I may “perish”, to borrow an academic turn of phrase.

In the classroom, student attendance is sporadic at best. In many cases this is because they no longer “have to” show up to class to pick up the material. It’s required to be posted online (again this could be made available to AI training, the material posted technically belongs to the institution), and also they don’t really need to learn anything to do their final papers. Here is where I think AI is causing the most damage: student learning and skill development.

I begin every new class with a whole spiel about learning how to do research and how to communicate research findings. I try to reason with them that they need these skills; simply using AI means they fail themselves even if they manage to pass the class. Their future boss is not going to pay them salary to input prompts to AI and email or print off the output. It never fully gets through. Now we see university leaders, clueless as to how to fight back against the deskilling that has further undermined the concept of higher learning, setting up degree programs in “such and such with AI”. Buzz word loaded plans are shared institutionally without anyone ever asking why. Ironically, one area where AI might do a sufficiently mediocre job is in university management, perhaps turning those meetings that could have been an email into actual emails.

It’s aggravating. I can’t even imagine how bad this is going to get before it gets better. If it does.

—Andrew

Bosses are rushing to use AI to implement “unstaffed opening hours” at public libraries and to deskill school librarians

I’m a library worker and union organizer, working at a public library service in Melbourne Australia. My job at the library is running tech help workshops, but on the side I organize my workplace and organize with other union activists across public libraries in my state.

I thought you might be interested in one of the specific applications of AI in libraries. While this hasn’t led to any significant job less yet, I think it points to the future of the sector. There are two twin technological threats currently facing public libraries in Australia and around the world, and both of these seek to replace (unionised) library workers. This is on top of a culture war on libraries and library workers with the fascist transphobes attacking public libraries for running drag storytime events or even just having queer books in the collection.

In Melbourne there is a rush by bosses to implement unstaffed opening hours at public libraries. While this hasn’t led to a reduce in staffed opening hours yet, once the technology is introduced it can and will be used to replace staff hours as funding gets cut. In addition to the threat of unstaffed libraries, the introduction of an ‘AI’ chatbot to school libraries is directly threatening the jobs of skilled librarians. Called “Book Bot” by Huey, this chatbot housed in an iPad with cutesy trimmings replaces the job of a librarian in helping kids to find appropriate books to read. The company is advertising it as a solution to underfunding and understaffing in schools.

Ironically this private company has received government funding to do this. While Huey’s Book Bot hasn’t been introduced to public libraries yet to my knowledge, taken with the technology of unstaffed library access there is a clear threat to public libraries and all of us who work in the sector.

—Taichen

[Editor’s note: Taichen also shared two briefing documents they’d put together with coworkers; one on AI chatbots in libraries, and another on unstaffed libraries, aimed at educating other library workers. I’m sharing them here.]

Teaching has become a bullshit job

Programming instructor at a community college

I now teach programming online at a community college where I spend most of my time trying to detect cheaters and fake accounts. There’s a whole racket around state and federal scholarships paying nonexistent students. AI facilitates the process of creating profiles and pretending to take classes.

Almost every faculty meeting is about training us teachers how to teach students to use AI rather than helping us teach students how to think and learn and write. Even teaching has become a bullshit job.

I may be able to turn it around for some of my students by showing them how they can build text adventure games and then automate the playing of their text adventure games with AI. But only the most disciplined students (and those without the time constraints of working bullshit jobs to pay off their education debt) will get much out of my course. An English teacher colleague was able to buck the trend and was able to shame his students into writing thoughtful essays. But it takes a lot of effort and skill that isn’t being taught to overworked teachers.

Universities are worse. Much of the funding for Social Media and AI impact research in psychology, sociology, computer science, etc, chins from big tech and most papers do not even critically question whether AI is reasoning at all, or the ethics and safety of teaching and using it. Lost in the noise are the authentic voices of Timbit Gebru, Melanie Mitchel, even Gary Marcus and the few impactful researchers questioning the inevitability of AI as a tool for hyper capitalism, fascism, and genocide. It’s like Hitler discovered the nuclear bomb before the US did. And now fascism is mainstream, almost unquestioned, inevitable. It’s not the power of AI so much as the power of technology to shape minds -- the capture of all sources of media and information and art. It’s just 1984, exactly as Reagan dreamed and Orwell feared. Fiction and art and news are no longer consumed as warnings coming from authentic smart human voices, they are just entertainment, brainwashing tools. And artists and teachers and workers have no alternative but to participate in the ponzi scheme or starve.

—Anonymous

AI Killed my job grading student essays

Grader

One of the first jobs I got out of college (2008, recession era) was grading student essays for standardized tests. Cool job, lots of retired teachers did it. We sat in a huge room for a few months, maybe 45-60 people, and scored every essay written by fifth graders in a state a few states away from where we were, based on pretty specific criteria. Just a temp job, to be clear.

Years later, this was a job I did during COVID, something that could be done remotely. But now the training, done online, only had 8-12 people in it, with some people flunking out of that training, and the work itself was scheduled only to last a few weeks. I learned that most of this essay grading was done by AI, and we were only getting the papers AI couldn’t quite handle.

—Brian Nicholson

The AI evangelists are tough to fight with

“Tech guy” working in a school system

I’m not a teacher but I am a “tech guy” in a school system. We’ve taken a very slow and steady approach with it, banning its use in all but very specific cases, and requiring teachers to define how they’ll be used. But there are students who use it without any regard for the right or wrong of it.

But what has frustrated me most about it is the teachers trying to push for more AI access. They want to use it as 1) AI detectors, and no amount of “that doesn’t work” has convinced them. Or 2) to grade and summarize papers.

And it drives me crazy when I say “does the student’s work differ significantly from their previous work?” they look at me like I have six heads. Like thinking about whether the student’s most recent paper reads like a “written-by-HR” ass document is a huge ask.

And as for point 2, there comes a time when I have to look at them and say “if the students are writing papers with AI, and you’re summarizing the papers with AI, then why are any of us in this building.”

To be clear, most of these folks are decent and only want the very minimal AI intrusion in their classrooms. But the few that are loudly in favor are driving me up a wall.

Like I said, most of the teachers (and students!) either want little to do with AI stuff, or just the barest minimum of streamlining a process they have difficulty with. And, for instance, our Special Ed folks are looking for uses of the tech that will help their students fill the needs they have. It’s noble for the most part, and I appreciate that they’re willing to listen to feedback and really talk through these things.

But the evangelists are tough to fight with. No amount of “these companies are hoovering up data” and “we have both legal and moral obligations to protect our students’ privacy” convinces them, even when we point out that they are not FERPA or COPPA compliant.

—B-rad

My team of education workers has been cut in half

Team manager at an edtech company

My current job is as a team manager at a small private education adjacent tech company where we’ve seen traffic steadily decline because LLMs can do what we do (even if it is more expensive, less reliable, and wrong more often than not).

To try to find our place in this new world, over the last year, we’ve seen a transition away from our normal creative and fulfilling development work towards generating massive datasets that we’ve sold off as “training data” for LLMs to many of the big tech companies, under the guise of getting them better at math and reasoning.

This work is often mind numbing and demoralizing and especially demeaning to have creative programmers turn out rote, repetitive work like this. Worse than the generation is the QA sweep (that devs got looped in on) of manually looking over these massive datasets to do a quality pass.

Moreover, while this project was sold to me as being a deal so lucrative that it would set us up for the next few years, and let us hire new developers, but once we finally got paid, it only just brought the budget back to zero. So it increasingly seems like this is the future of my work and this company.

We had one round of layoffs last year when these projects started that my team luckily avoided. However, I was just told that more layoffs are coming. I know several good developers who are looking for work elsewhere, but the tech industry as a whole seems to be on a bit of a hiring freeze, and many of us have health insurance needs or families to support that makes simply walking away a terrifying choice.

[We followed up with the contributor to see what’s changed since they wrote to us six months ago. They had this to say:]

My team has literally been cut in half since my last message. Some were let go, some reassigned to different departments, and some quit seeing the writing on the wall. One person was let go on the spot via email because they were having trouble with their pc, and the company decided to end their contract on the spot rather than help them debug the technical issue.

My company, at least my corner of it, creates k-12 and collegiate math and science education material. My team helped create dynamic and visual aids, and homework-helping walkthroughs to solve problems in math and science. These are used some in classrooms, but mostly by students doing homework. A lot of my team are former teachers and educators who find this work engaging and satisfying - they feel they are still contributing to the education of the next generation, just in a more indirect way than teaching. My favorite feedback I hear from people in the wild when they find out where I work is some variation of “Thanks for getting me through high school math!”

Gen AI has not replaced this work, but because sites like ChatGPT can do most of what we can do without manual development work, our internal priorities have shifted away from creating these programs towards other efforts. The few of us who remain are instead tasked with figuring out how to best integrate LLM technology into our already existing tools and functions. This involves building the runway as the plane is taking off - creating the tools we need to use, as we are using them.

Multiple people have had their future contracts tied to specific LLM-related projects, and I’ve been told in not so many words, that if the project fails, these people are gone. But without any clear roadmap or direction, let alone documentation for how to do such integration, I feel like they are being set up to fail. The deadlines for these are fast approaching, and hopefully what we’ve cobbled together will be acceptable, but even if they are, they will still be LLM-powered features, and thus have the same inaccuracy and inconsistency problems that plague all LLM projects. It would be embarrassing to release something that can be so incorrect at times, when this company is known for mathematical accuracy. It’d be like if your pocket calculator occasionally returned 2+2=5.

—Anonymous

Gen AI Edtech platforms “lovebombed” my client and then my contract was up

Edtech contractor

The last two years have been hell because working in tech education, you are fighting to make [clients] understand the risks and harms, and they all think they can just use a gen ai LMS to make the trainings that you make. We are increasingly seen as disposable, especially as women. I notice men in tech aren’t losing money making training, but we are. But that’s another story.

I had a contract up until this month to make IT trainings for an educational setting. I lost the role because they got love bombed, basically, by two large gen ai edtech platforms. All these promises of productivity and ease of content creation etc. It won’t work out for them long term but they don’t see that. Anyway, part of the sales pitch was how the gen ai can make training on policy and other tech areas—which was my job. They are so sold on this that they ended my 6 month probation with “we don’t see the trial as working”. I made incredible material for them, and worked in small groups and individually with staff on how to use the IT. Some of them had never used Word or Outlook before. They will now have terrible mandatory training too, full of errors and stolen work, but it will be generated in minutes. No one will proofread it or think like I do about the language, the accessibility. They just want easy quick work. And the saddest thing is they won’t even save money as they are paying the Twitter and TikTok influencers who work with these platforms TWICE what they paid me in one month to come and “train staff”.

—Michelle

The hiring committee requires applicants that would incorporate Copilot in their workflows. I didn’t get the job.

Teaching Fellow

I applied for a role as a “Ethics and Regulatory Coordinator” at the University of Auckland a few weeks back. the role seemed to require the applicant to act as a go-between for researchers making applications, committee members making decisions on what kind of research they’ll allow, and the university bureaucracy itself. The detailed job description includes a point about applicants being familiar with Microsoft Office, Including Copilot. As a final piece of background, ethics applications at UoA have been taking a while and some researchers have been frustrated with long wait times and inconsistent feedback from committees, while the committee is apparently sick of dealing with poor-quality research applications that require a lot of remedial work.

At the job interview, I was asked about my familiarity with using Copilot to create efficiency solutions in the Office. I gave a measured answer where I noted the usefulness of AI tools when summarizing spreadsheets and creating templates etc but said I didn’t trust Microsoft’s claim about data being separate and also stated I didn’t think we should use LLMs in decision-making or communications (email summaries and responses etc) for research ethics.

It took an unusually long time to hear back about their hiring decision, I had to email the relevant HR person to ask if something had happened. When I did get a call, I was told that they appreciated my experience with research design and ethics etc but they needed to find someone who was comfortable with incorporating Copilot into the ethics process and experienced with doing so.

—Benjamin Richardson

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This installment of AI Killed My Job was was made possible in part by support from the Omidyar Network’s Tech Journalism Fund.

“AI didn’t quite kill my current job, but it does mean that most of my job is now training AI to do a job I would have previously trained humans to do,” he told me. “It certainly killed the job I used to have, which I used to climb into my current role.” He was concerned for himself, as well as for his more junior peers. As he told me, “I have no idea how entry-level developers, support agents, or copywriters are supposed to become senior devs, support managers, or marketers when the experience required to ascend is no longer available.”

When we checked back in with Jacques six months later, his company had laid him off. “I was actually let go the week before Thanksgiving now that the AI was good enough,” he wrote.

He elaborated:

Chatbots came in and made it so my job was managing the bots instead of a team of reps. Once the bots were sufficiently trained up to offer “good enough” support, then I was out. I prided myself on being the best. The company was actually awarded a “Best Support” award by G2 (a software review site). We had a reputation for excellence that I’m sure will now blend in with the rest of the pack of chatbots that may or may not have a human reviewing them and making tweaks.

It’s been a similarly rough year for so many other workers, as chronicled by this project and elsewhere—from artists and illustrators seeing client work plummet, to translators losing jobs en masse, to tech workers seeing their roles upended by managers eager to inject AI into every possible process.

And so we end 2025 in AI Killed My Jobs with a look at copywriting, which was among the first jobs singled out by tech firms, the media, and copywriters themselves as particularly vulnerable to job replacement. One of the early replaced-by-AI reports was the sadly memorable story of the copywriter whose senior coworkers started referring to her as “ChatGPT” in work chats before she was laid off without explanation. And YouTube was soon overflowing with influencers and grifters promising viewers thousands of dollars a month with AI copywriting tools.

But there haven’t been many investigations into how all that’s borne out since. How have the copywriters been faring, in a world awash in cheap AI text generators and wracked with AI adoption mania in executive circles? As always, we turn to the workers themselves. And once again, the stories they have to tell are unhappy ones. These are accounts of gutted departments, dried up work, lost jobs, and closed businesses. I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work, and others, who, to their chagrin, have been forced to use AI themselves.

Readers of this series will recognize some recurring themes: The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.

As for Jacques, he’s relocated to Mexico, where the cost of living is cheaper, while he looks for new work. He’s not optimistic. As he put it, “It’s getting dark out there, man.”

Before we press on, a quick word: Many thanks for reading Blood in the Machine and AI Killed My Job. This work is made possible by readers who pitch in a small sum each month to support it. And, for the cost of $6, a decent coffee a month, or $60 a year, you can help ensure it continues, and even, hopefully, expands. Thanks again, and onwards.

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The next installments will focus on education, healthcare, and journalism. If you’re a teacher, professor, administrative assistant, TA, librarian, or otherwise work in education, or a doctor, nurse, therapist, pharmacist, or otherwise work in healthcare, please get in touch at AIKilledMyJob@pm.me. Same if you’re a reporter, journalist, editor, or a creative writer. You can read more about the project in the intro post, or the installments published so far.

This story was edited by Joanne McNeil.

They let go of the all the freelancers and used AI to replace us

Social media copywriter

I believe I was among the first to have their career decimated by AI. A privilege I never asked for. I spent nearly 6 years as a freelance social media copywriter, contracting through a popular company that worked with clients—mostly small businesses—across every industry you can imagine. I wrote posts and researched topics for everything from beauty to HVAC, dentistry, and even funeral homes. I had to develop the right voice for every client and transition seamlessly between them on any given day. I was frequently called out and praised, something that wasn’t the norm, and clients loved me. I was excellent at my job, and adapting to the constantly changing social media landscape and figuring out how to best the algorithms.

In early 2022, the company I contracted to was sold, which is never a sign of something good to come. Immediately, I expressed my concerns but was told everything would continue as it was and the new owners had no intention of getting rid of freelancers or changing how things were done. As the months went by, I noticed I was getting less and less work. Clients I’d worked with monthly for years were no longer showing up in my queue. I’d ask what was happening and get shrugged off, even as my work was cut in half month after month. At the start of the summer, suddenly I had no work. Not a single client. Maybe it was a slow week? Next week will be better. Until next week I yet again had an empty queue. And the week after. Panicking, I contacted my “boss”, who hadn’t been told anything. She asked someone higher up and it wasn’t until a week later she was told the freelancers had all been let go (without being notified), and they were going to hand the work off to a few in-house employees who would be using AI to replace the rest of us.

The company transitioned to a model where clients could basically “write” the content themselves, using Mad Libs-style templates that would use AI to generate the copy they needed, with the few in-house employees helping things along with some boilerplate stuff to kick things off.

They didn’t care that the quality of the posts would go down. They didn’t care that AI can’t actually get to know the client or their needs or what works with their customers. And the clients didn’t seem to care at first either, since they were assured it would be much cheaper than having humans do the work for them.

Since then, I’ve failed to get another job in social media copywriting. The industry has been crushed by things like Copy.AI. Small clients keep being convinced that there’s no need to invest in someone who’s an expert at what they do, instead opting for the cheap and easy solution and wondering why they’re not seeing their sales or engagement increasing.

For the moment, honestly I’ve been forced to get into online sex work, which I’ve never said “out loud” to anyone. There’s no shame in doing it, because many people genuinely enjoy doing it and are empowered by it, but for me it’s not the case. It’s just the only thing I’ve been able to get that pays the bills. I’m disabled and need a lot of flexibility in the hours I work any given day, and my old work gave me that flexibility as long as I met my deadlines - which I always did.

I think that’s another aspect to the AI job killing a lot of people overlook; what kind of jobs will be left? What kind of rights and benefits will we have to give up just because we’re meant to feel grateful to have any sort of job at all when there are thousands competing for every opening?

–Anonymous

I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off

Corporate content copywriter

I’m a writer. I’ll always be a writer when it comes to my off-hours creative pursuits, and I hope to eventually write what I’d like to write full-time. But I had been writing and editing corporate content for various companies for about a decade until spring 2023, when I was laid off from the small marketing startup I had been working at for about six months, along with most of my coworkers.

The job mostly involved writing press releases, and for the first few months I wrote them without AI. Then my bosses decided to pivot their entire operational structure to revolve around AI, and despite voicing my concerns, I was essentially forced to use AI until the day I was laid off.

Copywriting/editing and corporate content writing had unfortunately been a feast-and-famine cycle for several years before that, but after this lay-off, there were far fewer jobs available in my field, and far more competition for these few jobs. The opportunities had dried up as more and more companies were relying on AI to produce content rather than human creatives. I couldn’t compete with copywriters who had far more experience than me, so eventually, I had to switch careers. I am currently in graduate school in pursuit of my new career, and while I believe this new phase of my life was the right move, I resent the fact that I had to change careers in the first place.

—Anonymous

I had to close my business after my client started using AI

Freelance copywriter

I worked as a freelance writer for 15 years. The last five, I was working with a single client - a large online luxury fashion seller based in Dubai. My role was writing product copy, and I worked my ass off. It took up all my time, so I couldn’t handle other clients. For the majority of the time they were sending work 5 days a week, occasionally weekends too and I was handling over 1000 descriptions a month. Sometimes there would be quiet spells for a week or two, so when they stopped contacting me...I first thought it was just a normal “dip”. Then a month passed. Then two. At that point, I contacted them to ask what was happening and they gave me a vague “We have been handling more of the copy in-house”. And that was that - I have never heard from them again, they didn’t even bother to tell me that they didn’t need my services any more. I’ve seen the descriptions they use now and they are 100% AI generated. I ended up closing my business because I couldn’t afford to keep paying my country’s self employment fees while trying to find new clients who would pay enough to make it worth continuing.

-Becky

We had a staff of 8 people and made about $600,000. This year we made less than $10k

Business copywriter

I was a business copywriter for eCommerce brands and did B2B sales copywriting before 2022.

In fact, my agency employed 8 people total at our peak. But then 2022 came around and clients lost total faith in human writing. At first we were hopeful, but over time we lost everything. I had to let go of everyone, including my little sister, when we finally ran out of money.

I was lucky, I have some friends in business who bought a resort and who still value my marketing expertise - so they brought me on board in the last few months, but 2025 was shaping up to be the worst year ever as a freelancer. I was looking for other jobs when my buddies called me.

At our peak, we went from making something like $600,000 a year and employing 8 people... To making less than $10K in 2025 before I miraculously got my new job.

Being repeatedly told subconsciously if not directly that your expertise is not valued or needed anymore - that really dehumanizes you as a person. And I’m still working through the pain of the two-year-long process that demolished my future in that profession.

It’s one of those rare times in life when a man cries because he is just feeling so dehumanized and unappreciated despite pouring his life, heart and soul into something.

I’ve landed on my feet for now with people who value me as more than a words-dispensing machine, and for that I’m grateful. But AI is coming for everyone in the marketing space.

Designers are hardly talked about any more. My leadership is looking forward to the day when they can generate AI videos for promotional materials instead of paying a studio $8K or more to film and produce marketing videos. And Meta is rolling out AI media buying that will replace paid ads agencies.

What jobs will this create? I can see very little. I currently don’t have any faith that this will get better at any point in the future.

I think the reason why is that I was positioned towards the “bottom” of the market, in the sense that my customers were nearly all startups and new businesses that people were starting in their spare time.

I had a partner Jake and together we basically got most of our clients through Fiverr. Fiverr customers are generally not big institutions or multi-nationals, although you do get some of that on Fiverr... It’s mostly people trying to start small businesses from the ground up.

I remember actually, when I was first starting out in writing, thinking “I can’t believe this is a job!” because writing has always come naturally to me. But the truth is, a lot of people out there go to start a business and what’s the first thing you do? You get a website, you find a template, and then you’re staring at a blank page thinking “what should I write about it?” And for them, that’s not an easy question to answer.

So that’s essentially where we fit in - and there’s more to it, as well, such as Conversion Rate Optimization on landing pages and so forth. When you boil it all down, we were helping small businesses find their message, find their market, and find their media - the way they were going to communicate with their market. And we had some great successes!

But nothing affected my business like ChatGPT did. All through Covid we were doing great, maybe even better because there were a lot of people staying home trying to start a new business - so we’d be helping people write the copy for their websites and so forth.

AI is really dehumanizing, and I am still working through issues of self-worth as a result of this experience. When you go from knowing you are valuable and valued, with all the hope in the world of a full career and the ability to provide other people with jobs... To being relegated to someone who edits AI drafts of copy at a steep discount because “most of the work is already done” ...

2022-2023 was a weird time, for two reasons.

First, because I’m a very aware person - I remember that AI was creeping up on our industry before ChatGPT, with Jasper and other tools. I was actually playing with the idea of creating my own AI copywriting tool at the time.

When ChatGPT came out, we were all like “OK, this is a wake up call. We need to evolve...” Every person I knew in my industry was shaken.

Second, because the economy wasn’t that great. It had already started to downturn in 2022, and I had already had to let a few people go at that point, I can’t remember exactly when.

The first part of the year is always the slowest. So January through March, you never know if that’s an indication of how bad the rest of the year is going to be.

In our case, it was. But I remember thinking “OK, the stimulus money has dried up. The economy is not great.” So I wasn’t sure if it was just broad market conditions or ChatGPT specifically.

But even the work we were doing was changing rapidly. We’d have people come to us like “hey, this was written by ChatGPT, can you clean it up?”

And we’d charge less because it was just an editing job and not fully writing from scratch.

By the end of that year, the company had lost the remaining staff. I had one last push before November 2023 (the end of the year has historically been the best time for our business, with Black Friday and Christmas) but I only succeeded in draining my bank account, and I was forced to let go of our last real employee, my sister, in early 2024. My brother and his wife were also doing some contract work for me at the time, and I had to end that pretty abruptly after our big push failed.

I remember, I believed that things were going to turn around again once people realized that even having a writing machine was not enough to create success like a real copywriter can. After all, the message is only one part of it - and divorced from the overall strategy of market and media, it’s never as effective as it can be.

In other words, there’s a context in which all marketing messages are seen, and it takes a human to understand what will work in that context.

But instead, what happened is that the pace of adoption was speeding up and all of those small entrepreneurs who used to rely on us, now used AI to do the work.

The technological advancements of GPT-4, and everyone trying to build their own AI, dominated the airwaves throughout 2023 and 2024. And technology adoption skyrocketed.

The thing is, I can’t even blame people. To be honest, when I’m writing marketing copy I use AI to speed up the process.

I still believe you need intelligence and strategy behind your ideas, or they will simply be meaningless words on a screen - but I can’t blame people for using these very cheap tools instead of paying an expert hundreds of dollars to get their website written.

Especially in my end of the market, where we were working with startup entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their way to success.

When I officially left the business a few months ago, that left just my partner manning the Fiverr account we started with over 8 years ago.

I think the account is active enough to support a single person now, but I wouldn’t be so sure about next year. The drop off from 2022 to 2023 was BAD. The drop off from 2023 to 2024 was CATASTROPHIC.

Normally there are signs of life around April - in 2025, May had come and there was hardly a pulse in the business.

I still believe there may be a space for copywriters in the future, but much like tailors and seamstresses, it will be a very, very niche market for only the highest-end clients.

—Marcus Wiesner

My hours have been cut from nearly full time to 4-5 a month

Medical writer

I’m a medical writer; I work as a contract writer for a large digital marketing platform, adapting content from pharma companies to fit our platform. Medical writers work in regulatory, clinical, and marketing fields and I’m in marketing. I got my current contract job just 2 years ago, back when you could get this job with just a BA/BS.

In the last 2 years the market has changed drastically. My hours have been cut from nearly full time up to March ‘24 to 4-5 a month now if I’m lucky. I’ve been applying for new jobs for over a year and have had barely a nibble.

The trend now seems to be to have AI produce content, and then hire professionals with advanced degrees to check it over. And paying them less per hour than I make now when I actually work.

I am no longer qualified to do the job I’ve been doing, which is really frustrating. I’m trying to find a new career, trying to start over at age 50.

—Anonymous

We learned our work had been used to train LLMs and our jobs were outsourced to India

Editor for Gracenotes

So I lost my previous job to AI, and a lot of other things. I always joke that the number of historical trends that led to me losing it is basically a summary of the recent history of Western Civilization.

I used to be a schedule editor for Gracenote (the company that used to find metadata for CDs that you ripped into iTunes). They got bought by Nielsen, the TV ratings company, and then tasked with essentially adding metadata to TV guide listings. When you hit the info button on your remote, or when you Google a movie and get the card, a lot of that is Gracenote. The idea was that we could provide accurate, consistent, high-quality text metadata that companies could buy to add to their own listings. There’s a specific style of Gracenote Description Writing that still sticks out to me every time I see it.

So, basically from when I joined the company in late 2021 things were going sideways. I’m based in the Netherlands and worker protections are good, but we got horror stories of whole departments in the US showing up, being called into a “town hall” and laid off en-masse, so the writing was on the wall. We unionised, but they seemed to be dragging their feet on getting us a CAO (Collective Labour Agreement) that would codify a lot of our benefits.

The way the job worked was each editor would have a group of TV channels they would edit the metadata for. My team worked on the UK market, and a lot of us were UK transplants living in the NL. During my time there I did a few groups but, being Welsh, I eventually ended up with the Welsh, Irish and Scottish channels like S4C, RTE, BBC Alba. The two skills we were selling to the company were essentially: knowledge of the UK TV market used to prioritise different shows, and a high degree of proficiency in written English (and I bet you think you know why I lost the job to AI, but hold on).

Around January 2024 they introduced a new tool in the proprietary database we used, that totally changed how our work was done. Instead of channel groups that we prioritised ourselves, instead we were given an interface that would load 10 or so show records from any channel group, which had been auto-sorted by priority. It was then revealed to us that for the last two years or so, every single bit of our work in prioritisation had been fed into machine learning to try and work out how and why we prioritised certain shows over others.

“Hold on” we said, “this kind of seems like you’ve developed a tool to replace us with cheap overseas labour and are about to outsource all our jobs”

“Nonsense,” said upper management, “ignore the evidence of your lying eyes.”

That is, of course, what they had done.

They had a business strategy they called “automation as a movement” and we assumed they would be introducing LLMs into our workflow. But, as they openly admitted when they eventually told us what they were doing, LLMs simply weren’t (and still aren’t) good enough to do the work of assimilating, parsing and condensing the many different sources of information we needed to do the job. Part of it was accuracy, we would often have to research show information online and a lot of our job amounted to enclosing the digital commons by taking episode descriptions from fanwikis and rewriting them; part of it was variety, the information for the descriptions was ingested into our system in many different ways including press sites, press packs from the channels, emails, spreadsheets, etc etc and “AI” at the time wasn’t up to the task. The writing itself would have been entirely possible, it was already very formulaic, but getting the information to the point it was writable by an LLM was so impractical as to be impossible.

So they automated the other half of the job, the prioritisation. The writing was outsourced to India. As I said at the start, there’s a lot of historical currents at play here. Why are there so many people in India who speak and write English to a high standard? Don’t worry about it!

And, the cherry on the cake, both the union and the works council knew this would be happening, but were legally barred from telling us because of “competitive advantage”. They negotiated a pretty good severance package for those of us on “vastcontracts” (essentially permanent employees, as opposed to time-limited contracts) but it still saw a team of 10 reduced to 2 in the space of a month.

—Anonymous

Coworkers told me to my face that AI could and maybe should be doing all my work

Nonprofit communications worker

I currently work in nonprofit communications, and worked as a radio journalist for about four years before that. I graduated college in 2020 with a degree in music and broadcasting.

In my current job, I hear about the benefits of AI on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, those benefits consist of doing tasks that are a part of my direct workload. I’m already struggling to handle the amount of downtime that I have, as I had worked in the always-behind-schedule world of journalism before this (in fact, I am writing this on the clock right now). My duties consist mainly of writing for and putting together weekly and quarterly newsletters and writing our social media.

After a volunteer who recorded audio versions of our newsletters passed away suddenly, it was brought up in a meeting two hours after we heard the news that AI should be the one to create the audio versions going forward. I had to remind them that I am in fact an award-winning radio journalist and audio producer (I produce a few podcasts on a freelance basis, some of which are quite popular) and that I already have little work to do and would be able to take over those duties. After about two weeks of fighting, it was decided that I would be recording those newsletters. I also make sure our website is up-to-date on all of our events and community outings. At some point, I stopped being asked to write blurbs about the different events and I learned that this task was now being done by our IT Manager using AI to write those blurbs instead. They suck, but I don’t get to make that distinction. It has been brought up more than once that our social media is usually pretty fact-forward, and could easily be written by AI. That might be true, but it is also about half of my already very light workload. If I lost that, I would have very little to do. This has not yet been decided.

I have been told (to my face!) by my coworkers that AI could and maybe should be doing all of my work. People who are otherwise very progressive leaning seem to see no problem with me being out of work. While it was a win for me to be able to record the audio newsletters, I feel as if I am losing the battle for the right to do what I have spent the last five years of my life doing. I am 30 and making pennies, barely able to afford a one-bedroom apartment, while logging three-to-four hours of solitaire on my phone every day. This isn’t what I signed up for in life. My employers have given me some new work to do, but that is mostly planning parties and spreading cheer through the workplace, something I loathe and was never asked to do. There are no jobs in my field in my area.

I have seen two postings in the past six months for communications jobs that pay enough for me to continue living in my apartment. I got neither of them.

While I am still able to write my newsletter articles, those give me very little joy and if things keep progressing at this rate I won’t even have those. I’ll be nothing but a party planner. I don’t even like parties. Especially not for people who think I should be out of a job.

At this rate, I have seen little pushback from my employer about having AI do my entire job. Even if I think this is a horrible idea, as the topics I write about are often sensitive and personal, I have no faith that they will not go in this direction. At this point, I am concerned about layoffs and my financial future.

[We checked in with the contributor a few weeks after he reached out to us and he gave us this update:]

I am now being sent clearly AI written articles from heads of other departments (on subjects that I can and will soon be writing about) for publication on our website. And when I say “clearly AI,” I mean I took one look and knew immediately and was backed up by an online AI checker (which I realize is not always accurate but still). The other change is that the past several weeks have taught me that I don’t want to be a part of this field any longer. I can find another comms job, and actually have an interview with another company tomorrow, but have no reason to believe that they won’t also be pushing for AI at every turn.

—Anonymous

I’m a copywriter by trade. These days I do very little

Copywriter

I’m a copywriter by trade. These days I do very little. The market for my services is drying up rapidly and I’m not the only one who is feeling it. I’ve spoken to many copywriters who have noticed a drop in their work or clients who are writing with ChatGPT and asking copywriters to simply edit it.

I have clients who ask me to use AI wherever I can and to let them know how long it takes. It takes me less time and that means less money.

Some copywriters have just given up on the profession altogether.

I have been working with AI for a while. I teach people how to use it. What I notice is a move towards becoming an operator.

I craft prompts, edit through prompts and add my skills along the way (I feel my copywriting skills mean I can prompt and analyse output better than a non-writer). But writing like this doesn’t feel like it used to. I don’t go through the full creative process. I don’t do the hard work that makes me feel alive afterwards. It’s different, more clinical and much less rewarding.

I don’t want to be a skilled operator. I want to be a human copywriter. Yet, I think these days are numbered.

—Anonymous

I did “adapt or die” using AI, but I’m still in a precarious position

Ghostwriter

From 2010-today I worked as a freelance writer in two capacities: freelance journalism for outlets like Cannabis Now, High Times, Phoenix New Times, and The Street, and ghostwriting through a variety of marketplaces (elance, fiverr, WriterAccess, Scripted, Crowd Content) and agencies (Volume 9, Influence & Co, Intero Digital, Cryptoland PR).

The freelance reporting market still exists but is extremely competitive and pretty poorly paid. So I largely made my living ghostwriting to supplement income. The marketplaces all largely dried up unless you have a highly ranked account. I do not because I never wanted to grind through the low paid work long enough. I did attempt to use ChatGPT for low-paid WriterAccess jobs but got declined.

Meanwhile, my steadiest ghostwriting client was Influence & Co/Intero Digital. Through this agency, I have ghostwritten articles for nearly everyone you can think of (except Vox/Verge): NYT, LA Times, WaPo, WSJ, Harvard Business Review, Venture Beat, HuffPost, AdWeek, and so many more. And I’ve done it for execs for large tech companies, politicians, and more. The reason it works is because they have guest posts down to a science.

They built a database of all publisher’s guidelines. If I wanted to be in HBR, I knew the exact submission guidelines and could pitch relevant topics based on the client. Once the pitch is accepted, an outline is written, and the client is interviewed. This interview is crucial because it’s where we tap into the source and gain firsthand knowledge that can’t be found online. It also gets the client’s natural voice. I then combine the recorded interview with targeted online research to find statistics and studies to back up what the client says, connect it to recent events, and format to the publisher’s specs.

So ChatGPT came along December 2022, and for most of 2023 things were fine, although Influence & Co was bought by Intero, so internal issues were arising. I was with this company from the start when they were emailing word docs through building the database and selling the company several times. I can go on and on about how it all works.

We as writers don’t use ChatGPT, but it still seeped into the workflow from the client. The client interview I mentioned above as being vital because it gets info you can’t get online and their voice and everything you need to do it right—well those clients started using ChatGPT. By the end of 2023, I couldn’t handle it anymore because my job fundamentally changed. I was no longer learning anything. That vital mix that made it work was gone, and it was all me combining ChatGPT and the internet to try and make it fit into those publications above, many of which implemented AI detection, started publishing their own AI articles, and stopped accepting outside contributions.

The thing about writing in this instance is that it doesn’t matter how many drafts you write, if it doesn’t get published in an acceptable publication, then it looks like we did nothing. What was steady work for over a decade slowed to a trickle, and I was tired of the work that was coming in because it was so bad.

Last summer, I emailed them and quit. I could no longer depend on the income. It was $1500-$3000 a month for over a decade and then by 2024 was $100 a month. And I hated doing it. It was the lowest level bs work I hated so much. I loved that job because I learned so much and I was challenged trying to get into all those publications, even if it was a team effort and not just me. I wrote some killer articles that ChatGPT could never. And the reason AI took my job is because clients who hired me for hundreds to thousands of dollars a month decided it’s not worth their time to follow our process and instead use ChatGPT.

That is why I think it’s important to talk about. I probably could still be working today in what became a content mill. And the reason it ultimately became no longer worth it isn’t all the corporate changes. It wasn’t my boss who was using AI—it was our customers. Working with us was deemed not important, and it’s impossible to explain to someone in an agency environment that they’re doing it to themselves. They will just go to a different agency and keep trying, and many of the unethical ones will pull paid tricks that make it look more successful than it is, like paying Entrepreneur $3000 for a year in their leadership network. (Comes out to paying $150 per published post, which is wild considering the pay scale above).

The whole YEC publishing conglomerate is another rabbit hole. Forbes, CoinTelegraph, Newsweek, and others have the same paid club structure that happens to come with guest post access. And those publishers allow paid marketing in the guise of editorials.

I could probably write a book about the backend of all this stuff and how guest posts end up on every media outlet on the planet. Either way, ChatGPT ruined it, and I’m largely retired now. I am still doing some ghostwriting, but it’s more in the vein of PR and marketing work for various agencies I can find that need writers. The market still exists, even if I have to work harder for clients.

And inexplicably, the reason we met originally was because I was involved in the start of Adobe Stock accepting AI outputs from contributors. I now earn $2500 per month consistently from that and have a lot of thoughts about how as a writer with deep inside knowledge of the writing industry, I couldn’t find a single way to “adapt or die” and leverage ChatGPT to make money. I could probably put up a website and build some social media bots. But plugging AI into the existing industry wasn’t possible. It was already competitive. Yet I somehow managed to build a steady recurring residual income stream selling Midjourney images on Adobe stock for $1 a piece. I’m on track to earn $30,000 this year from that compared to only $12,000 from writing. I used to earn $40,000-$50,000 a year doing exclusively writing from 2011-2022.

I did “adapt or die” using AI, but I’m still in a precarious position. If Adobe shut down or stopped accepting AI, I’ll be screwed. It doesn’t help that I’m very vocally against Adobe and called them out last year via Bloomberg for training firefly on Midjourney outputs when I’m one of the people making money from it. I’m fascinated to learn how the court cases end up and how it impacts my portfolio. I’m currently working to learn photography and videography well enough to head to Vegas and LA for conferences next year to build a real editorial stock portfolio across the other sites.

So my human writing job was reduced below a living wage, and I have an AI image portfolio keeping me afloat while I try to build a human image/video portfolio faster than AI images are banned. Easy peasy right?

–Brian Penny

The agency was begging me to take on more work. Then it had nothing for me

Freelance copywriter

I was a freelance copywriter. I am going to be fully transparent and say I was never one of those people that hustled the best, but I had steady work. Then AI came and one of the main agencies that I worked for went from begging me to take on more work to having 0 work for me in just 6-8 months. I struggled to find other income, found another agency that had come out of the initial AI hype and built a base of clients that had realized AI was slop, only for their customer base to be decimated by Trump’s tariffs about a month after I joined.

What I think people fail to realize when they talk about AI is that this is coming on the tail end of a crisis in employment for college grads for years. I only started freelancing because I applied to hundreds of jobs after winding up back at my mom’s house during COVID-19. Anecdotally, most of my friends that I graduated with (Class of 2019) spent years struggling to find stable, full-time jobs with health insurance, pre-AI. Add AI to the mix, and getting your foot in the door of most white collar industries just got even harder.

As I continue airing my grievances in your email, I remember when ChatGPT first came out a lot of smug literary types on Twitter were saying “if your writing can be replaced by AI then it wasn’t good to begin with,” and that made me want to scream. The writing that I’m actually good at was the writing that nobody was going to pay me for because the media landscape is decimated!

Content writing/copywriting was supposed to be the way you support yourself as an artist, and now even that’s gone.

—Rebecca Duras

My biggest client replaced me with a custom GPT. They surely trained it using my work

Copywriter and Marketing Consultant

I am a long-time solopreneur and small business owner, who got into the marketing space about 8 years ago. This career shift was quite the surprise to me, as for most of my career I didn’t like marketing...or marketers. But here we are ;p

While I don’t normally put it in these terms, what shifted everything for me was realizing that copywriting was a thing — it could make a huge difference in my business and for other businesses, too. With a BA in English, and after doing non-marketing writing projects on the side for years, it just made a ton of sense to me that the words we use to talk about our businesses can make a big difference. I was hooked.

After pursuing some training, I had a lucrative side-hustle doing strategic messaging work and website copy for a few years before jumping into full-time freelancing in 2021. The work was fun, the community of marketers I was a part of was amazing, and I was making more money than I ever could have in my prior business.

And while the launch of ChatGPT in Nov ‘22 definitely made many of us nervous — writing those words brings into focus how stressful the existential angst has actually been since that day — for me and many of my copywriting friends, the good times just kept rolling. 2023 was my best year ever in business — by a whopping 30%. I wasn’t alone. Many of my colleagues were also killing it.

All of that changed in 2024.

Early that year, the AI propaganda seemed to hit its full crescendo, and it started significantly impacting my business. I quickly noticed leads were down, and financially, things started feeling tight. Then, that spring, my biggest retainer client suddenly gave me 30-days notice that they wouldn’t renew my contract — which made up half of what I needed to live on. The decision caught everyone, including the marketing director, off guard. She loved what I was doing for them and cried when she told me the news. I later found out through the grapevine that the CEO and his right hand guy were hoping to replace me with a custom GPT they had created. They surely trained it using my work.

The AI-related hits kept coming. The thriving professional community I enjoyed pretty much imploded that summer – largely because of some unpopular leadership decisions around AI. Almost all of my skilled copywriter friends left the organization — and while I’ve lost touch with most, the little I have heard is that almost all of them have struggled. Many have found full-time employment elsewhere.

I won’t go into all the ins-and-outs of what has happened to me since, and I’ll leave my rant about getting AI slop from my clients to “edit” alone. (Briefly, that task is beyond miserable.)

But I will say from May of 2024 to now, I’ve gone from having a very healthy business and amazing professional community, to feeling very isolated and struggling to get by. Financially, we’ve burned through $20k in savings and almost $30k in credit cards at this point. We’re almost out of cash and the credit cards are close to maxed. Full-time employment that’d pay the bills (and get us out of our hole) just isn’t there. Truthfully, if it wasn’t for a little help from some family – and basically being gifted two significant contracts through a local friend – we’d be flat broke with little hope on the horizon. Despite our precarious position, continuing to risk freelance work seems to be our best and pretty much only option.

I do want to say, though, that even though it’s bleak, I see some signs for hope. In the last few months, in my experience many business owners are waking up to the fact that AI can’t do what it claims it can. Moreover, with all of the extra slop around, they’re feeling even more overwhelmed – which means if you can do any marketing strategy and consulting, you might make it.

But while I see that things might be starting to turn, the pre-AI days of junior copywriting roles and freelancers being able making lots of money writing non-AI content seem to be long gone. I think those writers who don’t lean on AI and find a way to make it through will be in high-demand once the AI-illusion starts to lift en masse. I just hope enough business owners who need marketing help wake up before then so that more of us writers don’t have to starve.

–Anonymous

This installment of AI Killed My Job was completed with support from the Omidyar Network’s Tech Journalism Fund.

As a result, some of the workers that have been most impacted by clients and bosses embracing AI have been in creative fields like art, graphic design, and illustration. Since the LLMs trained and sold by tech companies have ingested countless illustrations, photos, and works of art (without the artists’ permission), AI products offered by Midjourney, OpenAI, and Google can recreate images and designs tailored to a clients’ needs at rates much cheaper than hiring a human artist. The work will necessarily not be original, and as of now it’s not legal to copyright AI-generated art, but in many contexts, a corporate client will deem it passable—especially for its non-public-facing needs.

This is why you’ll hear artists talk about the “good enough” principle. Creative workers aren’t typically worried that AI systems are so good they’ll be rendered obsolete as artists, or that AI-generated work will be better than theirs. Their fear is that clients, managers, and even consumers will deem AI art “good enough” as the companies that produce it push down their wages and corrode their ability to earn a living. (There is a clear parallel to the Luddites here, who were skilled technicians and clothmakers who weren’t worried about technology surpassing their skill, but the way factory owners used it to make cheaper, lower-quality goods that drove down prices.)

Sadly, this seems to be exactly what’s been happening, at least according to the available anecdata. I’ve received so many stories from artists about declining work offers, disappearing clients, and gigs drying up altogether, that it’s clear a change is afoot, and that many artists, illustrators, and graphic designers have seen their livelihoods impacted for the worse. And it’s not just wages. Corporate AI products are inflicting an assault on visual arts workers’ sense of identity and self-worth, as well as their material stability.

As with translators, the subject of the last installment of AI Killed My Job, there’s a widespread sense that AI companies are undermining a crucial pillar of what makes us human; our capacity to create and share art. Some of these stories, I will warn you, are very hard to read—to the extent that this is a content warning for descriptions of suicidal ideation. All, I think, help us better understand how AI is impacting the arts and the visual arts industry. A sincere thanks to everyone who wrote in and shared their stories.

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing,” as the from SF author Joanna Maciejewska memorably put it, “not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” These stories show what happens when it’s the other way around.

A quick note before we proceed: Soliciting, curating, and editing these stories, as well as producing them, is a time-consuming endeavor. I can only do this work thanks to readers who chip in $6 a month, or $60 a year—the cost of a decent cup of coffee, or a coffee table book, respectively. If you find value in it, and you’re able, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I would love to expand the scope and reach of this work. Many thanks, and onward.

Edited by Mike Pearl.

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Costume designs have been replaced with AI output that can’t be made by people who actually know how clothes work.

I work in the field of constructing costumes for live entertainment: theater, film/TV, ballet/opera, touring performers, etc.

Budget and scale is all over the map, from low-budget storefront theater in which one person designs and secures costumes for a production, up to a big-budget Broadway spectacular, which can have a dozen people on the design team alone and literally hundreds of makers creating the costumes from designs developed by the design team.

I’m seeing this happen typically on the low-budget to midrange end—community theater/high school theater, independent film, etc.: Producers and directors eliminating the position of costume designer in favor of AI image generation.

It comes up often in professional forums in the field, someone will share the AI generated costume “designs” and they will be literally impossible to construct for an actual human with materials available in the actual world—gravity-defying materials on pornographically cartoon bodies, etc.

-Rachel E. Pollock

Illustration work at ad agencies has disappeared.

I remember reading about the new stage of generative AI engines sometime in late 2022 in the NY Times, and seeing Dall-E and Midjourney's outputs and knowing it will mean trouble. Until then AI was making laughable 'art.' Really bad stuff. But all of a sudden the engines had leveled up.

I have been working in the comics and publishing industry for over 20 years, but the majority of my income was usually coming from work with advertising agencies. Whenever they needed to present an idea to a client I would come in and help with illustrations, and sometimes storyboards, this was all internal and would never be published, but it was still great to get paid for doing what I love most—drawing. I felt appreciated for my skills and liked working with other people.

It was in 2023 that It seemed like overnight all those jobs disappeared. On one of my very last jobs I was asked to make an illustrated version of an AI generated image, after that, radio silence. I had my suspicions that AI was the culprit, but could not know for sure, there was also a general downturn in the advertising industry at the time.

Finally I reached out to one of the art directors I work with and he confirmed that the creatives are using AI like crazy, there was no aspect of shame in presenting an AI illustration internally, no one would call you out on it, and it's sure as hell cheaper than using an illustrator. I had to deal with a sudden, very scary decrease in income. Meanwhile it felt like AI slop was mocking me from every corner of the internet, and every big company was promoting their new AI assistant. I was just disgusted with all these corporations jumping on the AI bandwagon not thinking of what the outcomes could be. and additionally, there was the insult of knowing that the engines were trained on working illustrators, including mine!

I used my free time to work on a new graphic novel, and eventually leaned into more comics work, which paid (a lot) less, but at least felt more creatively satisfying. The two years following the loss of work were difficult, definitely felt like the rug was taken out from under my feet, and I'm still adjusting to the new landscape, although I feel better about where I am now, I work harder than ever before, for less money. But at least the work will be seen by readers.

I'm hoping that in the world of comics the public shame of replacing an artist with AI will hold off the use of the technology, but I'm sure that one day it will become a lot more accepted. I feel like we live in an age where technological changes are happening too rapidly, and are not in any way reined in by the government, and humans can lose their job in the drop of a hat, with no sense of security or help. We are just not built for these fast changes. I'm happy to see people sobering up to the downside of this technology, and hoping the hype would die down soon.

-Anonymous

‘Children's book illustrator isn't a job anymore.’

I've been out of work for a while now. I made children's book illustrations, stock art, and took various art commissions.

Now I have several maxed out credit cards and use a donation bin for food. I haven't had a steady contract in over a year. two weeks ago, when a client who has switched to AI found out about this he gave me $50 out of "a sense of guilt." Basically pity for the fact that Illustrator, as a job, does not exist anymore.

I feel cheated, like if I could go back in time and tell the younger me in high school that all the practice, all the love, and all the hope from your parents and friends for your future gets you is carpal tunnel and poverty, I could have gone into a better job field. I'd be an electrician or welder.

I have a resume with skills that are appealing to no one, as slop can be generated for free.

I sold my colored pencils and markers and illustration tablet on Facebook marketplace for a steal once a previous client who I considered a friend boasted on LinkedIn that AI was the future of cost reduction above an image of a man in a suit who looked like him with six fingers holding a wad of cash.

I have applied to over one thousand jobs and I stopped keeping track. My disability didn’t effect making art, but makes me a poor candidate for much else.

It was my birthday recently and I sincerely considered not living anymore.

The worst part of all is that the parents who once supported me fully in being an artist sent me an AI generated picture of a caricature of themselves holding a birthday cake with my name spelled incorrectly. My friends all post themselves as cartoons online.

The person I married had a secret file on their computer labeled "AI pics" they thought I didn't notice.

I will wither away eating stale food from the garbage while everyone else is complacent with the slop generator doing what I used to put passion into and finely detail.

I don't think it's going to get better.

-Anonymous1

I’m a graphic artist. Since AI and Adobe Firefly came along, my teaching and tutoring have dropped dead.

I have taught various graphic courses but overwhelmingly Photoshop, the 800 lb. gorilla of the graphics world. I am not a photographer and I do not teach people to take photos, but to manipulate them, also known as Photo Imaging.

They are done by manually placing several images into a composite, and then enhancing them by various digital techniques such as layering, blending, masking etc. to arrive at a final result. Most people who take my classes don’t necessarily want to do all that I do, but want to know how to correct or otherwise manipulate photos to create their own projects. 

Since the advent of Artificial Intelligence and Photoshop’s version, Firefly, my teaching and private tutoring have pretty much dropped dead. There is very little incentive for people to learn these techniques when they can conjure up an image by text prompts. It takes virtually no skill to do this besides the ability to read and write. I have played around with A.I. for personal projects, with varying degrees of success. Some of it is amazing, and some of it is laughable. However, there is no escaping the reality that these models were trained on existing artwork already online. It’s essentially plagiarism on steroids. Also known as theft. Not to mention the obscene energy costs involved.

Had this happened to me 20 years ago I would have been devastated. But at this point in my life (I’m 71) it is not as important as it once was. I’ve had some success both in client work and also creating digital art pieces for which I’ve won accolades. I’ve found satisfaction in teaching but now I’m turning more to “natural media” (non-digital) art, specifically painting. I am developing a course to teach watercolor painting to adults and I’m quite excited by this prospect. I have been married over 50 years and we have never relied on my income to survive.

-Susan Oakes

My gig ended with my boss responding to my AI concerns with ‘There's always work out there.’ I haven’t worked since.

I worked in the video game industry, as a 3D artist.

In early 2023, when AI image generation was hitting the mainstream, I was working as a temporary contractor at a large games and technology company.

Our boss was very enthusiastic about AI image generation, and he showed us how he was using AI to generate some of the textures for the game. I realized that if AI image generation didn't exist, then the company would have needed to hire an extra artist to do that work. I could have recommended a dozen colleagues who were looking for work at the time. It felt like AI was directly taking money out of artist's pockets, and allowing the companies to keep it all.

When my contract with that company ended, I did an exit interview with my boss. I expressed concerns about being able to find further work. He handwaved me, saying "There's always work out there."

I have not been able to find any work since then.

There were several factors as to why there were so many layoffs in games and technology in 2023-2024, but I know that AI has played a role.

I miss working as a 3D artist.

-Anonymous

Those animated reenactments and infographics you see on TV history documentaries are made by people like me. Or at least they were.

I am a freelance 3D/2D Generalist. Over the past decade plus, I've had a recurring gig of being hired as a contractor to help create supplemental graphics and B-roll for various documentary-style programs. Everything from infographics about military tanks to 3D animations of prehistoric creatures to recreations of scenes involving historical figures.

If you've ever watched any History show, you know the format: footage of the host and experts speaking, then sometimes video clips or photographs, and then typically animated content that illustrates the points the speaker is making. That final category was, until recently, made by people like me. That market has completely dried up.

A couple of years ago, as soon as demos of AI-generated video began to appear, there were almost immediate rumblings that the specific business of creating documentary-style graphics would be disrupted. The logic being that, while the public might reject a feature-length AI-slop theatrical film, the at-home audience for shows about military history or ghosts or aliens might be less-discerning. That theory is now being tested. History Channel is currently airing a season of "Life After People" that heavily features AI-generated visuals, and I'm sure there are more shows in the pipeline being made the same way. We'll see how audiences respond.

As much as I would like to say viewers will reject the AI style and demand a return to human-made art, I'm not convinced it will happen. Even if it did, it might soon be too late to turn back. I know that there are studios with expert producers, writers, and showrunners with decades of experience in this exact genre who are closing their doors. That institutional knowledge will be gone.

That's probably the bigger point: this trend is not only affecting artists like me, but also the types of companies I contract for. Obviously I lament my own loss of those stable gigs, but my job loss is merely a side-effect of AI killing off studios higher up the chain that each represent dozens more people being put out of work.

-Anonymous

‘There's a part of me that will never forgive the tech industry for what they've taken from me and what they've chosen to do with it.’

I work as a freelance illustrator (focusing on comics and graphic novels but also doing book covers or whatever else might come my way) and as a "day job" I do pre-press graphic design work for a screen printing and embroidery company in Seattle. Because of our location, we handle large orders (sometimes 10k shirts at a time) for corporate clients—including some of the biggest companies in the world (Microsoft, Amazon, MLB, NHL, etc.) and my job is to create client proofs where I mock up the art on the garment and call out PMS colors as applicable. I also do the color separations to prepare the art file for screen printing. 

When AI first came on the scene, I was approached by a potential client that was self-funding a mobile game and wanted to commission me to create in-game art. He asked what my standard rate was and then offered to double it if I allowed him to pay in etherium (which I knew nothing about at that point.) I immediately had some concerns, but I'm a struggling artist so I took the gig anyway and crossed my fingers. He then introduced me to generative AI and encouraged me to use it to create game content quickly. At first I was interested in the possibility of using it to reduce my workload by maybe generating simple elements I get tired of painting—like grasses or leaves—but he instructed me to start plugging in the names of living artists to generate entire artworks in their style and the first time I did it I realized how horrifyingly wrong this actually was. After that I resisted and tried to use my own art. He grew frustrated with me pretty quickly and I left the company after less than 2 weeks (I was never paid; he owes/owed me about $1300).`

Since then, I have been very outspoken against generative AI and haven't touched it again. I was the moderator for a very large group of children's book illustrators (250k members) and I helped institute and enforce a strict AI ban within the group. While this was mostly a positive thing, there were quite a few occasions where legitimate artists were targeted for harassment over accusations of AI use. Some of them were even driven out of the group, in spite of our interventions and assurances that the person was not using AI. 

In my own freelancing work, I have now been accused of using AI as well. I like to do fan art from Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern [series], and sometimes when I'm looking for work I will post my art and past commissions in fan groups to see if anyone wants to hire me to draw their original characters based on the Pern books. Almost invariably now someone will ask if my art is AI generated. It used to bother me more than it does now, I'm growing a little numb to it.

My coworker at my screen printing job (in spite of knowing my negative feelings on the matter because I had cried after I found several dozen pieces of my art in the LAION dataset) chose to plug my art into an AI generator and asked for it to imitate my style—which it did poorly, might I add. It felt extremely violating. 

Lastly, in my role as a graphic designer, we often now have to deal with clients sending art files in for screen printing that were generated with AI. It's a pain in the ass because these files are often low-resolution and the weird smudgy edges in most AI images don't make for easy color separations. When a human graphic designer sits down to create a design, they typically leave layers in place that can be individually manipulated and that makes my job much easier. AI flattens everything so I have to manually separate out design elements if I want to independently adjust anything. The text is still frequently garbled or unreadable. The fonts don't actually exist so they can't easily be matched. These clients are also almost invariably cheap, and get upset when they're told that it's going to be a $75 per hr art charge to fix the image so it's suitable for screening.

Also, and here I don't have any data, just my personal anecdotal experience, but it feels like some of these companies have laid off so much of their in-house graphic design staff that they are increasingly reliant on us as a print service to fix up stuff they'd formerly done for themselves. I get simple graphic design requests every day by people who should have had the resources to handle this themselves but now they're expecting me to pick up the slack for the employees they've let go for the sake of our working relationship and keeping them on as clients. It's become such a drag on our small business that my boss is considering extra fees. (Which, considering the slim margins in the garment industry, is really saying something!) I am convinced Microsoft does not have any in-house graphic designers left at this point. Okay I joke, but man, it's bleak.

I have no way of knowing how many gigs I've lost to AI, since it's hard to prove a negative. I'm not significantly less busy than I was before, and my income hasn't really changed for better or worse. There's more stress and fear, greater workloads cleaning up badly-done AI-generated images on behalf of people looking for a quick fix, instead of getting to do my own creative stuff. And it felt deeply and profoundly cruel to have my life's work trained on without my consent, and then put to use creating images like deepfakes or child sexual abuse materials. That one was really hard for me as a mom. I'd rather cut my own heart out than contribute to something like that.

There's a part of me that will never forgive the tech industry for what they've taken from me and what they've chosen to do with it. In the early days as the dawning horror set in, I cried about this almost every day. I wondered if I should quit making art. I contemplated suicide. I did nothing to these people, but every day I have to see them gleefully cheer online about the anticipated death of my chosen profession. I had no idea we artists were so hated—I still don't know why. What did my silly little cat drawings do to earn so much contempt? That part is probably one of the hardest consequences of AI to come to terms with. It didn't just try to take my job (or succeed in making my job worse) it exposed a whole lot of people who hate me and everything I am for reasons I can't fathom. They want to exploit me and see me eradicated at the same time. 

-Melissa

The gig work exchange site I use is full of AI generated artwork I’m meant to fix — along with AI-generated job listings that don’t exist.

I’m a South African illustrator and designer with 20 years of experience, and in my industry, I saw things going pear-shaped even before gen AI hit the scene.

One the main places I get jobs from is on Upwork (one of those gig type work platforms), and I’ve noticed a couple of things: A decrease in job offerings for the illustration I typically do (like book covers).

I’ve also noticed a lot more job offers to “fix” an AI generated cover. These authors offer less money because of “the work is pretty much done” attitude.

Since Upwork added an AI function to help potential employers write their briefs, there’s been a surge in what I’m pretty sure are fake jobs. The job listings all sound very samey obviously because of the format the ai uses, and the employers have no history on the platform of ever having hired anyone and don’t have their phone or bank linked. So I think what might be happening is that some evil person/persons are creating fake accounts and posting fake jobs so that their competitors waste credits applying for these jobs.

-Roxane Lapa

I used to make erotic furry fan art for a fee. Now people just use AI.

I got my start on deviantart, moved on to furaffinity and various other websites. I used to take commissions in the furry fandom drawing futa furries with big fat tits and dicks. In the past year or two my commissions have all but dried up, in the time it can take me to do the lineart for an anthropomorphic quokka's foreskin, someone can just go onto one of a dozen websites and knock something of tolerable quality out in no time at all.

AI has ruined a once sacred artform.

-Anonymous

My AI-loving boss makes my team of artists use AI, even though I’ve successfully demonstrated that it doesn’t help.

I am the creative team manager for an e-commerce based company. I manage the projects of 2 videographers, 1 CG artist and 3 graphic designers (including myself).
As AI has been getting more and more advanced, our boss (one of the owners) keeps pushing us to use AI to make our images stand out amongst competitors.

We have a limited budget, so filming or photographing our products in real environments is difficult. And photoshopping them into stock imagery also takes time. Apparently a 1-hour turn around time per image is not quick enough. Our boss has been going to conferences where he hears and sees nothing but praise for AI created images. How quick it is and how "good" the images look like.

So of course he's been pushing us to use this technology. I did tell him that it's going to be a learning curve and to be patient. From Midjourney, to the latest update of Chat GPT, and to Adobe's Firefly. We've been cranking out these partial AI images.

The funny part is, A LOT of it still has to be photoshopped together. AI is still not smart enough (yet) to produce accurate images. The products we sell are very particular and even if you feed the AI images of said product, it never gets it 100% right.

Our boss didn't believe us so he himself tried it and failed miserably. Despite that, he still reminds us that our jobs will be obsolete and that we have to adapt.

Even since we started using AI to improve our images, the turnaround time for listing images remains the same. Though I feel like our boss is waiting for the day to fire and replace my team with AI.

-Anonymous

In 2D animation backgrounds, AI is hitting freelancers hard. But even for someone steadily employed like me it’s causing workplace headaches.

As an artist, I thought I was going crazy when it seemed everyone was okay (even enthusiastic) with our work being scraped left and right to build image-generation models. I'm a mom and have a mortgage to pay, so the existential threat to my livelihood caused a lot of sleepless nights to say the least.

I have been working in 2D animation for the last 10 years. I'm a background artist, which is unfortunately one of the departments most likely to be hit by gen AI replacement in the animation production pipeline. Of course, there's no reality where gen AI could actually do my job properly as it requires a ton of attention to detail. Things need to be drawn at the correct scale across hundreds of scenes. In many cases scenes directly hook up to each other, so details need to stay consistent—not to mention be layered correctly. But these are things that an exec typically glosses over in the name of productivity gains. Plus, there's already a precedent in which AI was used to produce backgrounds for a Netflix anime.

Thankfully, I'm very lucky to work at an artist-run studio that currently appears to avoid the use of AI, so I continue to be employed. My peers who were freelance illustrators or concept artists are not so lucky. I'd say about half of the people I've worked alongside this last decade have left the field (not all because of AI, granted, but the state of the North American animation/games industry is a whole thing right now and AI is not helping).

The production I am on currently leverages a lot of stock photos from Adobe Stock. We have a rule in place not to use AI, but some images slip through the cracks. These have to be removed from the finished product because of, I assume, the inability to copyright AI-generated images. An incident happened recently where an AI image almost made it to the very end of the pipeline undetected and wound up disrupting several departments who are on tight submission deadlines. We aren't typically paid overtime unless approved by the studio beforehand, so it's likely that unpaid labor (or ghost hours, where you don't tell anyone you worked overtime) went into fixing this mess AI created.

I watched — and sounded the alarm — as AI fever took hold inside Adobe. Then I was let go.

I was running research on [Adobe’s] stock marketplace, trying to understand how customers were adopting the new Gen A.I. tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E. Internally Adobe was launching their own text-to-image A.I. generator called Firefly but it hadn’t been announced. I was on the betas for Firefly and Generative Fill (GenFill) for Photoshop and ran workshops with designers on the Firefly team. I tested the new tooling internally and gave feedback on Adobe Slack channels and their ethics committee.

A.I. generated content started to flood the Adobe Stock website as stock contributors quickly switched from adding and uploading photos to prompting and creating assets with Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Firefly and then selling them back on Adobe Stock. Users wanted a better search experience but it was never explicitly clear if they wanted more A.I. slop, although Reddit forums indicated otherwise.

During the GenFill beta, I raised concerns about model bias after prompting the model to edit an image of then president Joe Biden across racial categories and having the model return a Black man with cornrows—without taking into account relevant and contextual surrounding information in the image. The ethics committee pointed me to a boilerplate Word doc with their guiding principles and we had a short Microsoft Teams call, but there wasn’t any real concern from their end. After raising additional red flags inside an Adobe Slack channel about Photoshop’s GenFill beta possibly being used to create misinformation at scale the main response I got was a blasé “Photoshop, making misinformation since 1990…” Long story long, the people internally working on these products really don’t care. In another company all hands meeting about text-to-vector capabilities fellow workers shared thoughts and concerns on the impact of AI tooling to the livelihoods of artists, illustrators and other designers in the Teams chat and no one cared. In another meeting when asked about artist’s rights a manager quipped “In the research from AdobeMAX (Adobe’s annual conference) someone said they were willing to sell their ‘artistic style’ for around the price of a car” when gathering data around AI-style mimicry and trust.

The Firefly model still struggled to render hands and certain objects with difficulty and an Adobe company wide email sent to all employees encouraged us to sign up for an upcoming photoshoot on a green screen, holding things like trumpets, accordions, rubber chickens and asked employees to make awkward expressions like being surprised with “mouth open” or squinting while putting your finger in your ear in exchange for a free lunch. 

Some time in 2023 Adobe paid for photographers to document crowds of people during a concert in Seattle and had attendees sign waivers releasing their likeness since Firefly had trouble rendering and distinguishing people in crowds. Shortly thereafter I was told my staff role was being eliminated. They didn’t let me switch teams. They gave me six weeks to find a new job inside the company and six weeks of severance pay. During the six weeks of “offboarding” as they called it I applied to dozens of internal jobs at Frame.io and other teams like Acrobat within the company and it never went anywhere. 

-Anonymous

I’m a recent design graduate. AI might not have killed my job, but it’s not what I signed up for, and it’s hard to find work.

I just graduated in June from a two-year intensive vocational program in graphic design. It's probably still too early in my job search for me to say that AI "killed my job," but my classmates and I, as well as students from the class just ahead of us, are certainly struggling to find work.

Why I wanted to reach out, though, is to share what my experience was as a student studying design in the midst of the peak years of this AI hype. Basically our entire second-year curriculum in one of our five classes, which was previously focused on UX, UI, web design, etc, transitioned to being largely generative AI-focused. I don't think I'm overstating matters to say that no one in my class was happy about this; none of us decided to go (back) to school for design to learn Midjourney or Runway.

[One instructor] has lived through and had his career significantly impacted by past shifts in the industry (he was a full-time web designer when platforms like Squarespace came along), so my charitable read is that he wants to prepare us for a lifetime of learning new tools to stay employable. I think the faculty in our program are also hearing from alumni and their technical advisory board that AI tools are becoming more important for local companies (we live in a pretty tech-centric city). So while he's sympathetic, I guess, he's still choosing to go all-in on AI, and to push his students to do the same.

In our other classes, AI use was varied. Some of our instructors allowed it; a couple still forbid it completely.

I came out of school feeling like... I guess I'm grateful to know what's out there, for the sake of my own employability in this really awful job market. I really feel for designers whose school days are a little further behind them. It's not just AI that makes me say this—in fact, even if things like image and video generators find a more permanent place in graphic arts careers, they're changing fast enough that whatever we learned in school is likely to be outdated pretty quickly. If all the angry posts I see on LinkedIn from more senior designers are any indication, there's been a trend in hiring for a while of companies looking for a designer who also does video, animation, UX/UI, and many other things that aren't really graphic design. Our program taught us a lot of those skills, so maybe, if the current economic circumstances improve, our class might be okay. But it makes me worry a lot for our future. Is it always going to be like this? I love learning, but am I always going to feel like I need to acquire skills in at least five new expensive SAS platforms to survive?

Even our AI-booster instructor told us over and over again that computers will never replace the need for creative design thinking and empathy. That, he said, is what we should lean into to distinguish ourselves and ensure our employability. But there are only so many positions out there for art directors, and not everyone who studies design wants to do that. Production design gets looked down on as "menial" by some, I think, but it used to be the pipeline into more senior design positions--and if that goes away, how do new designers even get into the field? And what about people who have worked in production their whole lives?

-Anonymous

I struggle to fix all the AI’s problems while my AI-loving clients stand on the sidelines wondering what the issue is.

I am a freelancer of a few trades, so it can be hard to measure lost work, because I can also wonder if I'm slow because times are slow, or a typical cycle, or AI.

I can tell you this: ALL my "lighter" graphic design work—making social media or print ad graphics, designing logos—has totally dried up. I was actually more worried about this when Canva came out, but even then they wanted my eye and my touch on things, so having the tools to do it themselves didn't really deter people from hiring me. I did this kind of work for some local small businesses, organizations, event venues. This was an abrupt change within the past couple years.

My illustration work is mostly picture books, and while my work has remained steady (I do 1-3 a year), the number of inquiries I've gotten from new authors has dropped to nearly zero, when I used to field a few a month and usually book myself out for the next year. Also, through Upwork and other various avenues I find work, I've had quite a few people (presumably authors) reach out to me to "fix" their AI generated art. It does depend on the task at hand but it's a 90% certainty that fixing the art will take nearly as long as just doing it myself. Of course they aren't coming to me with AI generated work because they intended to hire a full-blown illustrator. They are usually thinking they will pay for a couple hours of my time, when what they are asking for could require maybe 100 hours.

The "mistakes" AI makes on art for something like a picture book, which requires consistency of a lot of different elements across at minimum 16 or so pages, are so deep that they are in the bones of the art. It's not airbrushing out a sixth finger; it's making the faux colored pencil look the same across pages, or all the items in a cluttered room be represented consistently from different angles, or make the different characters look like they came from the same universe. It's bad at that stuff and it's not surface level. A lot of time potential clients don't know why the art isn't working and it's because it's these all-encompassing characteristics.

-Melissa E. Vandiver

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To wit: After I put out the call for AI Killed My Job stories, I heard from a lot of translators, interpreters, and video game localizers (essentially translators for in-game text, design and dialogue). Of all the groups I heard from, translators had some of the most harrowing, and saddest, stories to share. Their accounts were quite different from those described by tech workers, who were more likely to lament managements’ overuse of AI, a surfeit of dubious code in digital infrastructure, hasty layoffs, or the prospect of early retirement.

For most translators, early retirement is unthinkable. Many of the translators I heard from were underpaid and precariously employed before the AI boom hit, and had stuck with the field because they loved the work despite the downsides. Now, as you’ll see in the stories below, many have seen truly dramatic drops in their income. Multiple accounts describe work drying up almost entirely, and the prospect of having to change careers at a time when peers in their age group are thinking about retirement.

I also heard from a lot of game localizers working with Chinese mobile games in particular, perhaps because it’s an industry that touches both media and tech, where leadership may be more disposed to embrace AI initiatives. I received too many to include them all here, but suffice to say, the stories almost all described games companies drastically lowering rates, increasing reliance on AI for translation (with or without human editors), and slashing in-house localization staff.

In an interesting—and rather telling—wrinkle to the AI boom story, many translators noted that generative AI didn’t usher in any revolutionary improvement to already-existing technologies that have been used to automate translation for years. Long before AI became the toast of Silicon Valley, corporate clients had been pushing lower-paying machine translation post-editing (MTPE) jobs1, or editing the output of AI translation systems, though many translators refused to take them. Others said Google Translate had long been able to essentially what ChatGPT does now.

Yet many describe a dramatic disruption in wages and working conditions over the last two years, coinciding with the rise of OpenAI. Though my sample size is small, these stories fit my thesis that the real AI jobs crisis is that the drumbeat, marketing, and pop culture of "powerful AI” encourages and permits management to replace or degrade jobs they might not otherwise have. More important than the technological change, perhaps, is the change in a social permission structure.

Not one but two accounts detail how many translators dismissed ChatGPT at first, because they’ve heard companies tout many automation technologies over the years, all with limited impact—only to see the floor drop out now. And it’s not that ChatGPT is light years better than previous systems (lots of post-AI translation editing is still required), it’s just that businesses have been hearing months of hype and pontification about the arrival of AGI and mass automation, which has created the cover necessary to justify slashing rates and accepting “good enough” automation output for video games and media products. Everyone else is doing it, after all.

Yet much stands to be lost, even aside from decent wages and the livelihoods of the translators and interpreters who help make our cultures better understood. The quality of translations across the board, from video games to corporate communiques stands to decline, with AI output, according to interviewees, often being homogeneous, blind to local details, or flat-out wrong. Nuances about places and cultures, recognizable to a knowledgeable human interpreter risk disappearing, sanded down by blunt-force automation. It’s not overly dramatic to say that we risk losing the capacity for cultures to understand one another better if we’re all simply feeding output into each other’s automated translation systems.

These risks are existential enough that groups are organizing to push back. The Translators Against the Machine initiative is gathering stories and data about what it’s like to work in the industry right now, in a bid to grow solidarity among far-flung workers, and to “unite and join forces to rescue the translation profession from the claws of a market that aims to make us irrelevant and expendable.” The English-to-French games translator Lucile Danilov, who we’ll hear from shortly, has worked to poke holes in the ways that AI companies have been pitching AI translation to games companies. Forums and message boards are seething with discontent.

It’s of course unclear what the future holds, but there’s a growing sense that the AI phenomenon is more bubble than boom. As such, rather than viewing the enterprise AI frenzy on Silicon Valley’s terms, as an inevitable jobs apocalypse, we have an opportunity to view it on material terms, and examine how it’s actually playing out on the ground. On those terms, we see managers, executives, and corporations using rebranded automation software to increase volume and cut labor costs, starting with the most precarious workers. After all, an AI system does not have to be super-powerful for management to use it to degrade, deskill, and kill jobs. This, it seems, is what translators, interpreters, and localizers are experiencing, right now, on the front lines of the real AI jobs crisis. And these are their stories.

Three very quick notes before we move on. First, this newsletter, and projects like AI Killed My Job, require a lot of work to produce. If you find this valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. With enough support, I can expand such projects with human editors, researchers, and even artists—like Koren Shadmi, who I was able to pay a small fee for the 100% human-generated art above, and Mike Pearl, who is coming on to help edit installments in this project. If you would like an alternate way to offer support, I now have a Ko-fi page. Many thanks.

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Second, if your job has been impacted by AI, and you would like to share your story as part of this project, please do so at AIkilledmyjob@pm.me. I would love to hear your account—and will keep it confidential as I would any source. Third: I'm partnering with the good folks at More Perfect Union to produce a video edition of AI Killed My Job. If you're interested in participating, or are willing to sit for an on camera interview to discuss how AI has impacted your livelihood, please reach out. Thanks for reading, human, and an extra thanks to all those whose support makes this work possible. I have countless more stories in fields from law to journalism to customer service to art to share. Stay tuned, and onwards.

Translators have always been among the most threatened by automation

Translators have always been among the professions most threatened by automation, long before the advent of AI, through the development of machine translation engines like Google Translate or DeepL. But in recent years, the situation has dramatically worsened, despite LLMs producing consistently mediocre results.

The very definition of translation is not to convert words, but meaning. And while LLMs are able to replicate human speech patterns with eerie accuracy, it bears reminding that they don’t think nor understand like the human brain does. Which means that editing LLM outputs often takes as much time, if not longer, than translating from scratch.

Despite that, in an effort to cut costs and lower turnaround times, many translation agencies have been increasingly switching to a business model revolving around MTPE (Machine Translation Post Editing), slashing rates and often compromising the quality of the final product. This practice has long been seen as a bane by most translation professionals, who feel like their skills amount to a lot more than mere word-assembly lines to target the lowest common denominator.

Now, the concept of “polishing” a machine output is bleeding across all industries, and many are starting to realize that translators were the proverbial canaries in the creative coal mines.

-Lucile Danilov

Terrible Google translations once made the idea of automated translators laughable. I’m not laughing anymore

I have been using Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) tools for the past twenty-five years, as translation has always been an area of focus for machine learning and programming. The people creating these programs have heralded the end of human translation since the 1950's, with the Georgetown-IBM experiment in 1954. Back then they thought that it would just take a few years for machines to take over. What a joke!

Since that did not happen for decades, most of us in the translation industry scoffed at the idea that computational linguistics would ever find a way to replace us. I indeed use machine translation in my practice, much like an accountant uses software or an airline pilot uses autopilot. These tools are meant to take over routine tasks and reduce fatigue. (Although, even when using these tools, I still suffer from back and neck issues from sitting at a computer all day.) They help, but the idea that they can replace a human translator is ridiculous.

With ChatGPT, I honestly didn't think it would change anything and that people would still think of it with disdain as they did Google Translate (at least, they do where I live). But for the past year or so, I noticed that many clients have had less volume. When I asked them about whether they had work for me, people would say that of course I was first on their list, but they just didn't have anything. For the past six months, I have seen translators on LinkedIn that I know say that the same thing is happening to them. The work has dried up.

While I didn't have any real proof that my clients were choosing ChatGPT over me, a recent project showed that they are using this (or DeepL or some other AI tool). I was asked to translate a large document for an existing client I hadn't heard from in a while. They told me to refer to their website for their terminology. I said okay, wondering who exactly had been translating their site. When I read their site, you could see all of the telltale signs of AI: acronyms and terms translated inconsistently (this is a big sign), as well as the usual weird constructions and some of it just plain nonsense.

So now this creates work for me: I have to somehow refer to and use this slop while still doing a professional job. Then, when I have no choice but to change it, I have to write nice, diplomatic notes about the change!

I also learned in this big document about all of the content they produce to communicate with their audience: bulletins, emails, web content. And I think, They cannot be using AI for all of this? The result must be bad. But, according to their statistics, they still have a 50% open rate on their emails and people don't unsubscribe. (This is about the same as when I was translating their emails.) So, are they getting a cheaper translator or in-house staff to work on this content? Does the audience just not care that the translations are bad? I think, to some extent, people are inured to bad translations. "Well, I guess it's in English, so that's better than nothing, whatever." I don't know.

Another thing that seems to be happening (based on my anecdotal experience only) is that translation agencies are investing in this tech and then gobbling up the work from freelancers. And translation agencies really don't pay well, and even less for what we call "post-editing" (a fancy term for "fix the machine"). I recently put in a quote to a regular client for a contract at about 2/3 of the regular price that I charge, and they said that I was still too expensive. As a comparison, during the pandemic, I had to raise my prices as I was so busy. And so, now what, I have to lower them? What message does that send to clients about the value of my work?

Add the tariffs to this mix, and my economic life has completely turned upside down. No one wants to invest in new initiatives and projects. I do have diverse revenue streams, as I teach English online and edit novels, but teaching and editing do not pay nearly what translation does. I will be lucky to make $15 to $20 an hour teaching and editing, when translation pays at least 2 to 3 times that. So here I am, still 15 to 20 years from retirement, and I have had to put so much energy into "reskilling" for teaching and editing, which, even if they don't pay as well, are jobs that require in-depth, professional levels of skill! I laugh when politicians think that "reskilling" is this magical thing that anyone can pick up and do. Going back to school in your 40s and 50s when you still have kids to take care of, a house to manage, finances to manage, health to manage, aging parents to worry about and take care of, etc., etc. is one of the biggest jokes on working people. Fuck, am I tired.

I do count myself lucky, as even though my income has been cut in about half, I still have enough to live on for the moment. I have health insurance and retirement benefits through my province. (I also got a year of maternity leave, even though I am a freelancer, thank goodness.) I have no idea how people in the US without this safety net can get by without these essential programs.

However, it's not like simply living on less is a great option either. Housing in Canada is extraordinarily expensive. Food is expensive. And my employment is very precarious. I always have to plan for the day when the worst will happen. I can never relax. Living in this AI-driven economy is always expecting the rug to be pulled out from underneath you. I invested in my profession for years, and now I don't get to reap the benefits of that investment. I have to start all over again, always putting energy into this bottomless pit they call work.

For me, AI means white knuckling it your entire life until you retire. What joy, what rapture unforeseen!

-Anonymous

AI killed my job twice, maybe three times

AI killed my job. I think I can even say it's killed my job twice (possibly three times!?). With more to come!??

I graduated from my translation MA in 2010. I was in-house for a few years and then went freelance and was doing quite well—I was always an early adopter of new tech so was one of the first to take MTPE work. I saw that change my dynamic and then have seen it happen again once I sidestepped into copywriting around 2023, just as AI was really ramping up. I helped train a model for a big company... And then they got rid of me!

I've now done yet another pivot and I'm working in email building, using tools like Klaviyo and Braze, but I imagine that's vulnerable too.

I'm only 40. I never imagined my career as I knew it would be wiped out like this.

-Anonymous

I’ve translated documents for nuclear power plants. Now I’m facing bankruptcy

I've been a technical translator for 15 years, self-employed all the way. I enjoy it, I am good at it. I translate complicated, demanding material—mainly medical and pharmaceutical, like the UI and user guides for MRT imaging devices, or patient information and consent forms for clinical trials, or subtitles for a presentation on the side-effects of this or that new drug. I've translated documentation for the specialty filters you need in cooling loops for nuclear power plants and I've translated manuals for assembly systems for aircraft construction. I get to dive into obscure sub-specialties of technical fields and learn about stunning feats of engineering nobody has ever heard of. It's fun. In a field where everybody seemed perpetually on the brink of starvation, I was able to make a good living. There were always ups and downs, but I managed to clear six figures in the good years and didn't have to worry too much in the bad years. I worked long hours, I worked a lot of weekends, but I felt it all balanced out.

2025 has been absolute shit so far. Entire months went by with zero work. And the requests that are now coming in—almost all "PED.” Post-editing is when you run your text through a machine translation and have it reviewed and edited by a human. It's been around forever—since way before the current AI hype. It pays a quarter of what you'd get for translation work. And if you do it properly, it takes you just as long as translation. So I would summarily reject PED requests. I'd take one or two per year just to take a look at the current state of the art, and invariably found, happily, that machine translation was still awful and I was going to be fine.

As of today, I've earned maybe €8000 [about $9,300] this year. Requests are 90% PED. Unrelated calamities have drained the vast majority of my savings (just lucky, I guess). There is a very real possibility I'll end up in personal bankruptcy.

Machine translation hasn't even improved. There was no big OpenAI moment. I'm starting to suspect it's an unhappy coincidence of sunk costs and economic downturn forcing us all down this path. And you know what? I started learning to code—needed something to do after all. And ChatGPT and Claude started off as amazing helpful tools. Then at some point you've got the basics down and you're trying to do marginally more complex things—and you notice how quickly they lose track and fall apart, how needlessly complicated their solutions are, how your entire architecture turns into a mess of barely-functional spaghetti. Does this stuff work *anywhere*? My IT friends complain about being forced to use whatever hot new AI tool, and their companies stopped hiring junior positions. My own industry seems broken. After sending this mail, I'll have to do some tedious, underpaid post-editing. I'll hate it. Whoever will have to actually use the documents will hate it.

I believe this will pass. Sooner or later, the AI companies will have to stop losing money and adjust their pricing. And then it'll turn out that using AI for everything gets you worse results than humans, at the same cost. And that will be that. I hope I can hang on until then.

-Julian Pintat

A brain drain is coming

I'm a translator trainer at the University of Geneva, training people to work at the UN, WHO etc. One of our big challenges is getting young people through the doors to train—there is likely a big talent gap coming at the top of the profession as people retire over the next decade or so.

-Susan Pickford

I was a different kind of translator, but AI hollowed out the work

I was working as an accessible information writer. We would translate technical documents into Plain language (think gov sites) or instructions into Easy English (think “How to Catch a Train” for people with intellectual disabilities).

Although AI is expressly banned from being used to actually write the documents, AI was being used to check the documents, and then those modifications had to be used to re-edit those documents.

I’m not sure if management realized they were getting AI to write these documents—but with extra steps—or if they thought they were somehow bypassing internal policy, or if they thought this maintained privacy. It was quite plain to me that this workflow is not doing any of those things.

I left the job recently because I could see where it was going. Also because this was a top down initiative it was causing friction in the team. Writers were essentially being told to write for AI, then let the AI take the reigns.

This might seem like, sure, why not turn up to work and take the free money? But it was actually causing massive issues. Writers were being put on notice when our documents were being checked by peer review. No one on the peer review team would agree to a final copy. And so the sausage was fed back into the machine only to be stopped at peer review again. Then the writer was held accountable.

Even though AI was not directly being used to write the documents because it was in the middle of the process it may as well have been used. The outcome was unusable work for which the writers were being blamed. Sad stuff.

-”FF”

AI-only translation is happening now

I had been working on a mobile game for years and the agency that manages them recently told me the game will only have AI translation with no human proofreading, for my language pair and many others.

Generative AI in games is no surprise, most devs that have no budget resort to DeepL or Google, but the shift that I’ve seen is coming from big players and games that do earn money and are able to play localization: they just don’t want to anymore. Plus, they lower your rates so when the MTPE comes, you view it as you have no choice, because it’s either that or not working at all.

We’re at the expense of rich folks that want to be in the loop, discrediting our job while they do not know what it entails.

-Tamara Morales

After 14 years of translating to English in Rome, I’m considering cleaning houses

I'm an Italian to English translator living in Rome. I've done this job freelance for 14 years now, before that I worked in the music industry at a startup in SF. In these past 14 years as a translator, I've worked hard but I've also learned a lot while doing something I deeply love. Some of my clients, mostly agencies, started asking about MTPE a few years ago, and I told them that revising a machine translation takes me longer than a translation from scratch so why should I accept half my rate for it? Some of them started offering MTPE to their clients, but not all of them, and many of the translations I work on aren't really suitable for machine translation. I didn't really see a drop in work at that point, actually I had my best year ever in 2024. I diversified into copywriting as well.

Fast forward to June 2025. I did not receive a single work request AT ALL that month. I went from working 50-60 hours a week to essentially working zero. This month (August 2025) some work has trickled in, but it's very sporadic and unreliable, meaning I can't really do this job anymore and expect to pay my bills.

I don't know what to do at this point. I'm 44 years old, I've already changed careers in my lifetime and the job market is terrible, despite my experience as a translator, operations manager, degree in art history, fluent in 2 languages, decent and one and learning yet another. It feels like I might as well just start cleaning houses for a living, at least that's steady work and hasn't been replaced by AI yet. I have to wonder: once they've pushed us all out of our jobs, who will have the money to buy the products and services that capitalism requires of us?

-Katherine Kirby

We’re being paid half as much to do lower-skilled work

I have formal training in translation and have been working in the translation industry for 15 years, 5 years as a translator and 10 as a translation project manager. I'm 40 at the moment.

Work has been depressing, to say the least. All the projects I receive are AI translated and many of the translators I work with complain about the quality and the lack of work

The clients don't care, all they see is a cheap way to translate stuff and the faster, the better. Translators are now post editors or reviewers. Quality in translations has been decreasing but no one seems to care.

I work part-time as a freelance project manager and have been trying to get some freelance translation jobs on the side. All the job posts I see are for "AI trainer", "AI translation assistant", "AI assisted translator", etc.

It's disheartening. My industry has always been underpaid, for my language pair (English-European Portuguese), the medium rate is 0.04 € per source word. Now it's 0.02 € per source word for post editing AI translations. Many translators are accepting these rates because otherwise they would earn nothing.

I'm mentally exhausted just thinking about this. I want to change jobs, I want to work with something that will not involve computers and AI because I fear many jobs will be killed by AI.

-Anonymous

My work in corporate communications has come to a complete stop

I’ve been a freelance French-English translator since 1997, working primarily in corporate communications for large companies in France. My work started gradually diminishing about two years ago but has come to a complete stop this year and I’m having to find other sources of income.

I have always worked primarily for translation agencies that serve large companies and subcontract the actual translation work to me, although I have (or had) some direct clients as well. Machine translation has been around within the translation industry for many years now on basically the same basis as today’s AI.

Translation customers were aware of that, but since the translation service providers maintained the memories, they retained the upper hand, while freelance translators like me were mostly relegated to editing the computer output (a tedious task that never paid as well as translating). Now I suppose companies have realized they don’t need the outside provider and can just feed their text into a program like DeepL. About 5-7 years ago I started spending a far greater share of my time on editing computer output rather than translating, but my overall volume of work stayed roughly the same until two years ago. Now I’m getting virtually nothing. It’s certainly very rare now that I get a request to simply translate a document.

I’m 62. Translation has never been a high-paying career (my rates have barely changed since 1997; there’s intense downward pressure on rates, partly because competition is global) and I planned to continue working until I was nearly 70, but this has been a very disruptive change—at my age it’s very difficult to start a new career or even get hired.

-Anonymous

In 2019, companies would reach out to me. Today, I’m the one reaching out—and often being ignored.

I’m a 32-year-old from Italy, [and] I think that in the U.S., people are underestimating the impact AI is having on the millions of remote workers worldwide who, for over 15 years, have been silently doing much of the behind-the-scenes work for tech companies. I personally know hundreds of remote workers from Europe, Asia, and South America who are now struggling because of AI: Spanish translators from South America, low-level programmers from India, editing and graphic design experts from South Asia… Why hire them when AI can now do 95% of their job?

But let's go back to my personal situation: I studied History at university, but as you can imagine, finding a job related to that field in Italy proved nearly impossible.

In 2019, I changed paths and began working as an English–Italian translator. I studied and worked as a freelancer, collaborating with several agencies and clients for years—though none ever offered full-time employment (I know it's hard to find a full time contract freelancing, but after 5 years?). Still, I was happy, my clients were satisfied with my work. I earned more than enough to get by in Italy and enjoyed the work.

Back in 2019, tools like Google Translate were widely mocked in the translation community. We could easily spot machine-translated text, and we felt confident that no machine could truly replace us.

But something changed around 2022–2023. Large Language Models started producing output that was “good enough” to fool non-specialists, and good enough for large volume-low-quality jobs (like translating UI/UX, web marketing content, low-tier advertising and articles). I began getting complaints from clients who had unknowingly purchased machine-translated content. At first, this led to more work for me, as I was hired to fix these flawed translations.

Then came ChatGPT and a visible shift in the industry. Starting in 2023, we saw a massive drop in demand—probably over 70% from my personal experience looking at job offers online and by clients. Companies began using AI to translate everything: websites, terms of service, contracts, blogs, and internal documents. The amount of work available shrank dramatically, but the number of translators stayed the same. Universities still churn out thousands of new language professionals every year.

Back in 2019, companies would reach out to me, asking me to work with them. Today, I’m the one reaching out—and often being ignored. Rates have collapsed. Where I used to earn $0.03–$0.05 per word (already considered low by industry veterans), now most offers are for post-editing machine translations at around $0.01 per word. The more advanced the AI is for a language pair—like English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, or Portuguese—the lower the pay. Clients don't care if it takes me 2 hours to go through a text and proofread it. The AI takes 30 seconds to write it, so they want the translators to proofread it in 5 minutes!

Now, at 32, I find myself forced to start over once again—searching for a new career from scratch. But nearly every job posting related to soft skills is either “entry-level” with two years of experience required, or a ghost listing that never leads to a response. Just this week, I was interviewed for an internship—and rejected—by an AI after completing an automated test.

I understand that I’m probably a mediocre worker. I’m not part of the top 5%, and I’ll likely never learn to code or network my way into a company like Google. But what does the future hold for people like me? For the other 95% of the population who can’t afford to constantly reskill or upskill every couple of years just to keep up?

-Anonymous

Those who turned English translations of Chinese into other languages were the first to go

I’ve been working in localization for a Chinese game company for a number of years. I enjoy my job—the vast gulf between Chinese and English means I have a lot of creative freedom to make tweaks and changes to the text and add things like little references for English speaking audiences to enjoy. But over the past few years there’s been an increasing switch toward using AI for translation work.

We’ve so far managed to convince management that Chinese-English translation should remain human. But we also do what’s called pivot translation—that is, translating from Chinese to English then English to French/Spanish, etc. In this field we generally used skilled freelancers, but now the shift is to MTPE. I hate the fact we’re taking money away from skilled translators, but we’ve had no way to push back on it as the cost savings have been significant, those players don’t seem to mind, and the higher-ups don’t seem to care much about the opinion of players from those language groups.

-Anonymous

Salaried translators were given a choice: Take a 50% pay cut, or resign

I currently work at a company focused on localizing adult games from Japanese to English. (Yeah, hentai games.) I used to be one of the top 3 members of said company until this April, and I've been with the company for longer than both of the other two managers.

The company I work for has been actively avoiding the use of AI in our translations due to concerns over the final output's quality at every level of our localization process. (I, myself, was one of the translators within it advocating against the use of AI.) However, this has not been true for the company's competition. In recent years a domestic Japanese publisher of these games has decided to enter the English localization market, and they have had no qualms against using AI in order to churn out mediocre products faster and at greater scale, publishing the slop on Steam.

As a result, the company I've been working for has begun struggling to acquire licenses to titles to work on period. Because of this, our board of investors chose to divest and sell off the company to the man who was its acting general manager at the time. Then he, effective this April (the start of this financial year), came to all of us who were in any kind of salaried position and told us we could take a 50% (or higher) pay cut to stay on, or we could walk.

He gave us all claims that it was to “optimize efficiency” or “refocus on more profitable performance tasks,” but away from the others he admitted to me that it's mostly so the company could have more free capital on hand in order to compete for licenses better.

So in short, we've all had our salaries slashed because our competitors are unafraid to make liberal use of AI to churn out barely-passable slop translations of adult titles so they can flood the market and monopolize the supply-side (the original developers).

The worst part of it all? We're not even seeing much outcry or antipathy from the fanbase, which is usually quick to criticize localizations. So we're kind of left to conclude that either the developers don't care that their titles are only seeing middling sales abroad, or customers don't care if their porn is using AI slop so they're willing to buy it anyway.

-Anonymous

AI didn’t even improve efficiency; it just made the work worse

I'm a freelance translator and interpreter. (interpreters do what people call “live translation”) and I've loved this job for as long as I've had it. I started translating when I was fifteen (helped family members with their jobs) and have been interpreting for the last five. Now, my language pair is a common one, so my job wasn't JUST killed by AI, but it sure as hell didn't help. English is the lingua franca of our day (fun fact, lingua franca comes from French being the lingua franca of ITS day), so my job as an interpreter was going the way of the dodo sooner or later and I knew it; I didn't expect it to die off this soon, but them’s the breaks.

By 2023, ChatGPT and DeepL had burst into the scene and, suddenly, no more translations (except some legal and sworn texts, which I like); which, in a vacuum, ok. I mean, not great, I'm not getting paid, but whatever. My issue is not (only) that I wasn't getting any money, but the final product itself: the translations these things offer are, in the best of cases, ok. Now, if you've never translated, you might think this job is just going over a text with a dictionary and taking Spanish word A and plugging English word A where it was (that's my pair). I haven't worked with any other languages professionally, but I can guarantee that it's not how it works for me: languages have nuances that are painfully obvious if you use them (you might not be consciously aware of them, though) but, if you don't, are invisible. Most people don't know this, so what we're getting now are mediocre translations that are a ghost of their originals and which lose everything that made them stand out. And, because people can't tell, they're happy with them.

[These services] don't even save you that much time. They just change your workflow. I'm a lazy person (I swear this makes sense) so I learned fast to hand in ok first drafts. This means I'd devote about 60 to 70% of my time to writing a passable draft and then the rest of the time just editing it into shape.

With DeepL, five minutes are just dumping the text in and out, and I spend at least a day working whatever it gives me into something resembling anything closely related to decent. Then, a day punching it into an ok shape, and the rest of the week just tweaking it into something I can be fine with delivering. The end product? Something okay. For legal stuff that's fine, for anything else, not really.

The thing is that people are okay with it and are offloading a lot of work onto this service and ChatGPT.

And that's really one of the biggest issues I have with AI and what it's doing: it trivializes everything and turns it into “content” that is “good enough,” turning everything into a worthless mush; just stuff to fill our (work)days. AI didn't kill translation, it didn't kill my job, it killed everyone's capacity to care about anything but the bottom line; because the people who have traded me in for DeepL aren't even keeping the money they would've paid me or taking time off; they're just being forced into different bullshit jobs while some C-suite goof is off golfing or whatever it is they do for “fun” all while they talk about efficiency and numbers.

-Anonymous

AI-happy execs don't appreciate how much of game translation is about nuance

I do work in translation, but my main income comes from legal transcription editing. AI makes it more fucking annoying for sure, even though I'm an editor and not a direct transcriber anymore. I have to clean up stupid AI mistakes constantly when just paying a real person to do this would have made it smoother on all ends. The AI used cannot even determine the difference between the word stenography (a word that comes up a lot, since these are court proceedings with court reporters and videographers present) and sonography.

In the case of translation, what I really have experience with are the opinions of people in niche game communities who want to play older and/or untranslated Japanese games. I worked on the newest English translation of a re-release of a vaguely popular game, which thankfully did not use any AI. A lot of people seem to understand that machine translated or AI translated games are not going to give you an accurate or enjoyable experience, but a growing number of people seem to think that they're fine and that "any translation is better than no translation."

These people don't seem to appreciate how much of game translation is about nuance, tone, and characterization. An AI is not going to be able to accurately translate puns or preserve the rhyming scheme of a song while keeping the translation accurate as well. Translation is not just about looking up words in a dictionary and pasting them into a document. Hell, it's rare to even find a word or phrase that has one single translation that can't be interpreted to mean something slightly different. A good translator needs to be not only knowledgeable, but flexible and creative as well. So much goes into this line of work, but it's rare that people fully recognize the full extent of effort it takes to produce it.

-Anonymous

AI systems aren’t just driving down wages, they’re flattening culture

I've been a freelance French-to-English translator in Quebec for 15+ years… From 2020 to 2023, I was so busy that I was turning down work, and still easily clearing six figures, primarily from freelancing for a financial institution (FI) that was paying $0.25 per word.

In hindsight, there was a brief period when translators were able to leverage tech (in my case, CAT tools) to their advantage, but as soon as AI started blowing up in the media, the secret was out. In 2024, the FI restructured its department, hiring more in-house translators with what seemed to be the goal of doing as much MT post-editing (MTPE; industry lingo for going through a machine translation line by line and making sure there are no mistakes) in-house as possible and reducing outsourcing. I chose not to apply for an in-house position because I was not interested in working as an employee after having been self-employed for my entire working life (I also saw the writing on the wall and knew that the work would mostly be MTPE for in-house translators). It wasn't long before I stopped receiving freelance work from the FI. I also chose not to pursue other freelance or agency work in MTPE because it is mind-numbingly boring, frustrating, and not worth the lower rates, so I can't speak to what the agencies have been offering their freelancers.

In 2024, my income went down 60%, and this year it's looking like it will be 80% lower than between 2020 and 2023. Of my contacts in the field, many are pursuing other careers and/or have left the profession altogether. I did pursue training in another (artistic, much less lucrative) field when I was younger, and I plan on pursuing that path, because this industry is just depressing the hell out of me. Thankfully I live in a place with a strong safety net (universal healthcare, subsidized childcare, child benefit payments), I have a partner earning enough, we have enough savings, and we own our home. If I was in a different position, I think I'd likely have to start from scratch or go to school, because there really aren't many transferable skills that are safe from AI (think copywriting, editing, etc.).

While I do think that some AIs are decent at translating, MT will need human intervention for the foreseeable future. But no translator will ever tell you they got into this field to do MTPE.

More than anything, though, I find it disheartening that instead of a society that once valorized translators as intercultural communicators and professionals who could uphold a bilingual society, we're flattening culture with AI systems that don't allow for a more organic exchange between languages. Quebec, in particular, has a rich linguistic landscape in both French and English, which can be owed to the cross-pollination of languages and cultures through human interactions, one of which is/was translation. Also, it just sucks that capitalism has found another way to undermine workers.

I was happy to have what I perceived to be the power to be on my own and work according to my wants and needs. But that option is no longer open to me.

-Laura Schultz

Meanwhile, tech executives are pouring fuel on the flames. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, claims that AI products like his will soon eliminate half of entry level white collar jobs, and replace up to 20% of all jobs, period. OpenAI’s Sam Altman says that AI systems can replace entry level workers, and will soon be able to code “like an experienced software engineer.” Elsewhere, he’s been blunter, claiming "Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop."

But the question remains: What’s actually happening on the ground, right now? There’s no doubt that lots of firms are investing heavily in AI and trying to use it to improve productivity and cut labor costs. And it’s clear that in certain industries, especially creative ones, the rise of cheap AI-generated content is hitting workers hard. Yet broader economic data on AI impacts suggests a more limited disruption. Two and a half years after the rise of ChatGPT, after a torrent of promises, CEO talk, and think pieces, how is—or isn’t—AI really reshaping work?

About a month ago, I put out a call in hopes of finding some answers. I had a vague idea for a project I’d call AI Killed My Job, that would seek to examine the many ways that management has used AI to impact, transform, degrade, or, yes, try to replace workers outright. It’s premised on the notion that we’ve heard lots of speculation and plenty of sales pitches for AI automation—but we have not heard nearly enough from the workers experiencing the phenomenon themselves.

The title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek; we recognize that AI is not sentient, that it’s management, not AI, that fires people, but also that there are many ways that AI can “kill” a job, by sapping the pleasure one derives from work, draining it of skill and expertise, or otherwise subjecting it to degradation.

So, I wrote a post here on the newsletter explaining the idea, posted a call to social media, and asked for testimonials on various news shows and podcasts. I was floored by the response. The stories came rolling in. I heard from lots of folks I expected to—artists, illustrators, copywriters, translators—and many I didn’t—senior engineers, managers of marketing departments, construction industry consultants. And just about everyone in between. I got so many responses, and so many good ones, that I resolved to structure the project as a series of pieces that center the workers’ voices and testimonies themselves, and share their experiences in their own words.

Because I got so many accounts, I decided to break down the articles by field and background. Starting, today, with an industry that’s at once the source of the automating technology and feeling some of its most immediate impacts. Today, we’ll begin by looking at how AI is killing jobs in the tech industry.

I heard from workers who recounted how managers used AI to justify laying them off, to speed up their work, and to make them take over the workload of recently terminated peers. I heard from workers at the biggest tech giants and the smallest startups—from workers at Google, TikTok, Adobe, Dropbox, and CrowdStrike, to those at startups with just a handful of employees. I heard stories of scheming corporate climbers using AI to consolidate power inside the organization. I heard tales of AI being openly scorned in company forums by revolting workers. And yes, I heard lots of sad stories of workers getting let go so management could make room for AI. I received a message from one worker who wrote to say they were concerned for their job—and a follow-up note just weeks later to say that they’d lost it.

Of the scores of responses I received, I’ve selected 15 that represent these trends; some are short and offer a snapshot of various AI impacts or a quick look at the future of employment. Others are longer accounts with many insights into what it means to work in tech in the time of AI—and what it might mean to work, period. The humor, grace, and candor in many of these testimonials often amazed me. I cannot thank those who wrote them enough. Some of these workers took great risks to share their stories at a time when it is, in tech, a legitimate a threat to one’s job to speak up about AI. For this reason, I’ve agreed to keep these testimonies anonymous, to protect the identities of the workers who shared them.

Generative AI is the most hyped, most well-capitalized technology of our generation, and its key promise, that it will automate jobs, desperately needs to be examined. This is the start of that examination.

Three very quick notes before we move on. First, this newsletter, and projects like AI Killed My Job, require a lot of work to produce. If you find this valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. With enough support, I can expand such projects with human editors, researchers, and even artists—like Koren Shadmi, who I was able to pay a small fee for the 100% human-generated art above, thanks to subscribers like you. Second, if your job has been impacted by AI, and you would like to share your story as part of this project, please do so at AIkilledmyjob@pm.me. I would love to hear your account and will keep your account confidential as I would any source. Third, some news: I'm partnering with the good folks at More Perfect Union to produce a video edition of AI Killed My Job. If you're interested in participating, or are willing to sit for an on camera interview to discuss how AI has impacted your livelihood, please reach out. Thanks for reading, human, and an extra thanks to all those whose support makes this work possible. Tech is just the first industry I plan on covering; I have countless more stories in fields from law to media to customer service to art to share. Stay tuned, and onwards.

This post was edited by Mike Pearl.

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“AI Generated Trainers”

Content moderator at TikTok.

I have a story. I worked for TikTok as a content moderator from August 2022 to April 2024, and though I was not replaced by AI, I couldn't help noticing that some of the trainers were.

In my first year, I would be assigned training videos that featured real people either reading or acting. These trainings would be viewed internally only, not available to the public. Topics could be things like learning about biases, avoiding workplace harassment, policy refreshers, and so on. In the early months of my time there, the trainings were usually recorded slideshows with humans reading and elaborating on the topics. Sometimes they were videos that included people acting out scenarios. Over time, the human trainers were replaced with AI by way of generated voices or even people going over the materials in the videos.

It was honestly scary to me. I don't know how to explain it. I remember that they had added embellishments to make them seem more human. I distinctly remember a woman with an obscure black tattoo on her bicep. The speech and movement wasn't as clean as what I see in videos now, but it was close enough to leave me with an eerie sensation.

As far as content moderation goes, much of that is already done by AI across all major social media platforms. There has historically been a need for human moderators to differentiate grey areas that technology doesn't understand. (Example: someone being very aggressive in a video and using profanity, but it not being directed at an individual. AI might think the video involves bullying another user and ban the video, but a moderator can review it and see that there's no problem/no targeted individual.)

I think as AI models continue to learn, however, moderators will be replaced completely. That's just a theory, but I'm already seeing the number of these job postings dwindling and hearing murmurs from former coworkers on LinkedIn about widespread layoffs.

“AI is killing the software engineer discipline”

Software engineer at Google.

I have been a software engineer at Google for several years. With the recent introduction of generative AI-based coding assistance tools, we are already seeing a decline in open source code quality 1 (defined as "code churn" - how often a piece of code is written only to be deleted or fixed within a short time). I am also starting to see a downward trend of (a) new engineers' readiness in doing the work, (b) engineers' willingness to learn new things, and (c) engineers' effort to put in serious thoughts in their work.

Specifically, I have recently observed first hand some of my colleagues at the start of their career heavily relying on AI-based coding assistance tools. Their "code writing" consists of iteratively and alternatingly hitting the Tab key (to accept AI-generated code) and watching for warning underlines 2 indicating there could be an error (which have been typically based on static analysis, but recently increasingly including AI-generated warnings). These young engineers - squandering their opportunities to learn how things actually work - would briefly glance at the AI-generated code and/or explanation messages and continue producing more code when "it looks okay."

I also saw experienced engineers in senior positions when faced with an important data modeling task decided to generate the database schema with generative AI. I originally thought it was merely a joke but recently found out that they basically just used the generated schema in actual (internal) services essentially without modification, even if there are some obvious glaring issues. Now those issues have propagated to other code that needs to interact with that database and it will be more costly to fix, so chances are people will just carry on, pretending everything is working as intended.

All of these will result in poorer software quality. "Anyone can write code" sounds good on paper, but when bad code is massively produced, it hurts everyone including those who did not ask for it and have been trusting the software industry.

“How AI eliminated my job at Dropbox”

Former staff engineer at Dropbox.

I was part of the 20% RIF at Dropbox at the end of October.3 The stated reason for this was to focus on Dash, their AI big-bet. The 10% RIF in 2023 was also to focus more on Dash.

How did this eliminate my job? Internal reprioritization, that's how. I was moving into an area that was scheduled to focus on improving Dropbox's reliability stance in 2025 and beyond, intended to be a whole year initiative. It's tricky to go into details, but the aim was to take a holistic view of disaster preparedness beyond the long standing disaster scenarios we had been using and were already well prepared for. Projects like this are common in well established product-lines like Dropbox's file-sync offering, as they take a comprehensive overview of both audit compliance (common criteria change every year) and market expectations.

This initiative was canned as part of the RIF, and the staffing allocated to it largely let go. Such a move is consistent with prioritizing Dash, a brand new product that does not have dominant market-share. Startups rarely prioritize availability to the extent Dropbox's file-sync product does because the big business problem faced by a startup is obtaining market-share, not staying available for your customers. As products (and companies) mature, stability starts gaining priority as part of customer retention engineering. Once a product becomes dominant in the sector, stability engineering often is prioritized over feature development. Dropbox file-sync has been at this point for several years.

With Dash being a new product, and company messaging being that Dash is the future of Dropbox, a reliability initiative of the type I was gearing up for was not in line with being a new product scrapping for market-share. Thus, this project and the people assigned to it were let go.

Blood in the Machine: What are you planning next?

This job market is absolutely punishing. I had a .gov job for the .com crash, a publicly funded .edu job for the 2008 crash, and a safe place inside a Dropbox division making money hand over fist during the COVID crash (Dropbox Sign more than doubled document throughput over 2020). This is my first tech winter on the bench, and I'm getting zero traction. 37 job apps in the months I've been looking, 4 got me talking to a human (2 of which were referrals), all bounced me after either the recruiter or technical screens. Never made it to a virtual onsite.

This has to do with me being at the Staff Engineer level, and getting there through non-traditional means. The impact is when I go through the traditional screens for a high level engineer I flame out, because that wasn't my job. The little feedback I've gotten from my hunt is a mix of 'over-qualified for this position' and 'failed the technical screen.' Attempting to branch out to other positions like Product Manager, or Technical Writer have failed due to lack of resume support and everyone hiring Senior titles.

I may be retired now. I'm 50, but my money guy says I've already made retirement-money; any work I do now is to increase lifestyle, build contingency funds, or fund charitable initiatives. The industry is absolutely toxic right now as cost-cutting is dominating everything but the most recently funded startups. We haven't hit an actual recession in stock-prices due to aggressive cost and stock-price engineering everywhere, and cost-engineering typically tanks internal worker satisfaction. I've been on the bench for six months, money isn't a problem. Do I want to stick my head back into the cortisol amplifier?

Not really.

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“It's no longer only an issue of higher-ups: colleagues are using chatgpt to undermine each other.”

Tech worker, marketing department.

I used to work at a mid-sized Silicon Valley startup that does hardware. The overall project is super demanding, and reliant on skilled, hands-on work. Our marketing team was tiny but committed. My manager, the CMO4, was one of the rare ones: deeply experienced and seasoned in the big ones, thoughtful, and someone who genuinely loved his craft.

Last year, a new hire came in to lead another department. Genuinely believe she is a product of the "LinkedIn hustler / thought-leadership / bullshit titles" culture. Super performative.

Recently and during a cross-functional meeting with a lot of people present, she casually referred to a ChatGPT model she was fine-tuning as our "Chief Marketing Officer"—in front of my manager. She claimed it was outperforming us. It wasn’t—it was producing garbage. But the real harm was watching someone who’d given decades to his field get humiliated, not by a machine, but by a colleague weaponizing it.

Today, in the name of “AI efficiency,” a lot of people saw the exit door and my CMO got PIPd.5

The irony here is two-fold: one, it does not seem that the people who left were victims of a turn to "vibe coding" and I suspect that the "AI efficiency" was used as an excuse to make us seem innovative even during this crisis. Two, this is a company whose product desperately needs real human care.

[If your job has been impacted by AI, and you would like to share your story as part of this project, please do so at AIkilledmyjob@pm.me.]

“AI killed two of my jobs”

Veteran tech worker at Adobe and in the public sector.

AI killed my previous job, and it's killing my current one.

I used to work at Adobe... Despite constantly telling my team and manager I strongly disliked GenAI and didn't want to be involved in GenAI projects, when AI hype really started picking up, my team was disbanded and I was separated from my teammates to be put on a team specifically working on GenAI. I quit, because I didn't see any way for me to organize, obstruct, or resist without being part of building something that went against my values. I often wonder whether I should have let myself get fired instead. This was before we learned that Adobe trained Firefly on Stock contributions without contributors' opt-in, and before the Terms of Service debacle, so I'm glad I wasn't there for that at least.

Now I work in the public sector. It's better in most ways, but I have to spend ridiculous amounts of time explaining to colleagues and bosses why no, we can't just "use AI" to complete the task at hand. It feels like every week there's a new sales pitch from a company claiming that their AI tool will solve all our problems—companies are desperate to claw back their AI investment, and they're hoping to find easy marks in the public sector.

I don't want to be a curmudgeon! I like tech and I just want to do tech stuff without constantly having to call bullshit on AI nonsense. I'd rather be doing my actual job, and organizing with my colleagues. It's exhausting to deal with credulous magical thinking from decision-makers who should know better.

*My work at Adobe*

When I was at Adobe, I worked in Document Cloud. So like Acrobat, not Photoshop. For most of my time there, my job was evaluating machine learning models to see if they were good enough to put in a product. The vast majority of the time, Document Cloud leadership killed machine learning projects before they ended up in a product. That was either because the quality wasn't good enough, or because of a lack of "go-to-market.” In other words, middle and upper management generally did not accept that machine learning is only appropriate for solving a small subset of problems, which need to be rigorously-scoped and well-defined. They were looking for "everything machines" (these are derogatory air quotes, not a direct quote) that would be useful for huge numbers of users.

By the time AI hype really started to pick up, I had moved to a team working on internal tools. I wasn't building or evaluating machine learning models and I was outspoken about not wanting to do that. When LLM hype got really big, senior leadership started describing it as an "existential threat" (that is a direct quote as far as I remember), and re-organizing teams to get LLMs into Document Cloud as soon as possible. Adobe did not do *anything* quickly, so this was a huge change. A big red flag for me was that rather than building our own LLMs, Adobe used OpenAI's chatbots. When I asked about all of OpenAI's ethical and environmental issues, management made generic gestures towards being concerned but never actually said or did anything substantive about it. At that point I quit, because I had specifically been saying I didn't want to be involved in GenAI, and given the rushed and sloppy nature of the rollout, I didn't want my name anywhere near it.

*Colleagues' reactions*

Definitely I knew some colleagues who didn't like what Adobe was doing. There were a lot of people who privately agreed with me but publicly went along with the plan. Generally because they were worried about job security, but also there's a belief at Adobe that the company's approach to AI isn't perfect but it's more ethical than the competition. Despite being a huge company, teams were mostly isolated from each other, and as far as I know there wasn't a Slack channel for talking about AI concerns or anything like that. When I asked critical questions during department meetings or expressed frustration with leadership for ignoring concerns, people told me to go through the chain of command and not to be too confrontational.

Looking back, I wish my goal hadn't been to persuade managers but instead to organize fellow workers. I was probably too timid in my attempts to organize. I do regret that I didn't try having more explicit 1-on-1's about this, even though it would have been risky. Obviously I was very lucky/privileged to have enough savings to even consider quitting or letting myself get fired in this shitty job market, and I often wonder if I could have done more to combine strategies and resources with other colleagues so that fighting back would be less risky for everyone.

*Impact of AI on work*

When the GenAI push started, a lot more of my colleagues started working nights and weekends, which was rare (and even discouraged) before then. Managers paid lip service to Adobe's continuing commitment to work-life balance, but in practice that didn't match up with the sense of urgency and the unrealistic deadlines. I'm not aware of anyone who got fired or laid off specifically because of getting replaced by AI, and it looks like teams are still hiring. Although for what it's worth, in general Adobe does not do layoffs these days, but instead they pressure people into quitting by taking work away from them, putting them on PIPs, that kind of thing.

I found out that a colleague who had been struggling with a simple programming task for over a month—and refusing frequent offers for help—was struggling because they were trying to prompt an LLM for the solution and trying to understand the LLM's irrelevant and poorly-organized output. They could have finished the work in a day or two if they had just asked for help clarifying what they needed to do. I and their other teammates would gladly have provided non-judgmental support if they had asked.

Our team found out that a software vendor (I can't say which one but it was one of the big companies pushing Agentic AI) was using AI to route our service request tickets. As a result, our tickets were being misclassified, which meant that they were failing to resolve high-priority service disruptions that we had reported. We wasted days on this, if not weeks.

*My current job*

At my current job, I'm basically a combination of programmer and database administrator. I like the work way more than what I did at Adobe. Much like the corporate world, there are a lot of middle and upper managers who want to "extract actionable insights" from data, but lack the information literacy and technical knowledge to understand what they can (or should) ask for. And the people below them are often unwilling to push back on unreasonable expectations. It's very frustrating to explain to executives that the marketing pitches they hear about AI are not reflective of reality. It makes us seem like we're afraid of change, or trying to prevent "progress" and "efficiency."

So I would say the private and public sector have this in common: the higher up you go in the organization, the more enthusiastic people are about "AI,” and the less they understand about the software, and (not coincidentally) the less they understand what their department actually does. And to the extent that workers are opposed to "AI,” they're afraid of organizing, because it feels like executives are looking for reasons to cut staff.

“No crypto, no AI”

Tech worker.

So this is sort of an anecdote in the opposite direction of AI taking jobs—in a recent interview process at a mature startup in the travel tech space, part of the offer negotiations were essentially me stating “yeah I don’t want to work here if you expect me to use or produce LLM-based features or products” (this is relevant as the role is staff data scientist, so ostensibly on supply side of AI tooling), and them responding with “yeah if you want to do LLM work this isn’t the place for you.”

Though my network isn’t extensive, I feel like this is a growing sentiment in the small- and medium-tech space - my primary social media is on a tech-centric instance of the fediverse (hachyderm.io) and more often than not when I see the #GetFediHired hashtag, it’s accompanied by something akin to “no crypto, no AI” (also no Microsoft Teams, but I digress).

“Gradual addition of AI to the workplace”

Computer programmer.

Our department has now brought in copilot, and we are being encouraged to use it for writing and reviewing code. Obviously we are told that we need to review the AI outputs, but it is starting to kill my enjoyment for my work; I love the creative problem solving aspect to programming, and now the majority of that work is trying to be passed onto AI, with me as the reviewer of the AI's work. This isn't why I joined this career, and it may be why I leave it if it continues to get worse.

“my experience with AI at work and how I just want to make it do what I don't want to do myself”

Software engineer at a large tech firm.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be an artist. Any kind of artist. I still daydream of a future where I spend my time frolicking in my own creativity while my own work brings me uninterrupted prosperity.

Yet this has not come to pass, and despite graduate level art degrees, the only income I can find is the result of a second-class coding job for a wildly capitalist company. It’s forty hours a week of the dullest work imaginable, but it means I have time to indulge in wishful thinking and occasionally, a new guitar.

I am experiencing exactly what you describe. There’s been layoffs recently, and my company is investing heavily in AI, even though they’re not sure yet how best to make it do anything that our corporate overlords imagine it should do.

From the c-level, they push around ideas about how we could code AI to do work, but in reality, those on the ground are only using AI to help write code that does the work, as the code always has. Real use cases where AI can be used to do work that regular old programming could not are so rare that when I discovered one two weeks ago, I asked for a raise in the same breath as the pitch.

And here I am, five hundred words into this little essay, and I’ve barely touched on AI! Nor have I even touched any of the AI tools that are so proudly thrust into my face to produce this. I’ve played around with AI tools for creative writing, and while they’re good at fixing my most embarrassing grammar errors, none of them have helped me in my effort to bridge the gap between my humble talent as a creative and my aspirations for my effort.

There’s a meme going on Pinterest that I believe sums up this moment: “We wanted robots to clean the dishes and do our laundry, so we could draw pictures and write stories. Instead they gave us robots to draw pictures and write stories, so we could clean dishes and do laundry.” This feels very true in the sense that human talent is getting valued not for the time it took to gain it and the ingenuity it proves, but for how well it feeds the greed of those who can afford to invest in bulk. But art in capitalism has always been this way, hasn’t it? If we don’t have a patron, we might as well eat our paint, and AI only tightens that grip that the privileged have held us in for centuries.

I’ve never been so fortunate to consider the work that funds my DoorDash addiction to be my passion’s output, and perhaps that’s why I’m not afraid of what I’ll lose. But it’s that same work that has me sharing notes with fellow programmers, and many of them will say with blunt honesty that they’re worried they’ll be replaced by AI. This is a vulnerability I rarely see from the group of people who often elevated their work as valuable and practical, as opposed to my efforts to learn how to make music and poetry, which were wasteful and useless. But I am like a plant that learned how to grow on rocks and eat insects. In a meeting soon, I’m going to level with them:

Don’t you understand? This work, what we do day in and day out for a soulless organization that drives profit from stealing our essence, this is the laundry! And if they think I’ll just throw that work into a machine and let it do all the work for me, they’re right. But it’s a machine that automates the work of running machines that automates the work that people used to do by hand, while constantly stealing glances at the clock, just waiting for the moment when they could be out from under the gaze of some righteous egomaniac.

Maybe this is just the perspective of someone who’s seen her work, of almost any type, get devalued with such regularity that it’s hard to imagine the robots making it any more difficult than it already is. No one’s ever really cared about my Instagram posts. No one pretends that my code will change the world. Perhaps, someday, I’ll make more money while babysitting on the weekends. I spend a lot of time thinking about things that haven’t worked out for me, and for us, as a society, and I think some of our worst failures come from moments when we can’t differentiate between the ability to use machines and our abilities as machines.

Last week I made a pie for my family, and I obviously didn’t get paid for it. Somewhere off in the offices of the illuminati, an account will calculate the value of the oven that baked the crust, the refrigerator that cooled the filling, the bougie pie dish that made my effort look food-blog ready. But there’s no monetary value in the work I did that literally put food on the table, and I rarely, if ever, get paid to perform the music I love, or receive more than pocket change for the short stories I publish. I keep thinking that the solution for both problems exist in some future innovation, but I can’t imagine what that invention would be, and I can’t find proof of a real connection between the two.

Maybe ChatGPT knows the answer to this riddle? I can throw a penny into our new philosophy vending machine, but I might come up with a better answer myself if I think about it while I unload the dishwasher.

PS I didn’t use ai to write this, also didn’t even bother to push it through an ai extruder to check the grammar. I guess I’m just feeling too lazy today to push that button! Have a nice weekend.

[If your job has been impacted by AI, and you would like to share your story as part of this project, please do so at AIkilledmyjob@pm.me.]

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“AI-native high school interns”

Fintech worker.

Hello! I am a tech worker at a fintech. My workplace has been pushing AI really hard this year.

Here's the latest thing they thought up:

It 100% feels like testing the waters for just how unqualified and underpaid your workforce can be. Just as long as they can work the shovel of LLM they're good right?

The children yearn for the (LLM) mines!

“CrowdStrike”

Current CrowdStrike employee.

I work for CrowdStrike, the leading cybersecurity company in the United States. As a current employee, I can't reveal specific details about myself.

As you may have heard, CrowdStrike laid off 500 employees on May 7th, 2025. These were not underperformers. Many of them were relatively new hires. This action was presented as a strategic realignment with a special focus in "doubling down on our highest-impact opportunities," to quote CEO George Kurtz.

In the internal email, he states further:

AI investments accelerate execution and efficiency: AI has always been foundational to how we operate. AI flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster. It streamlines go-to-market, improves customer outcomes, and drives efficiencies across both the front and back office. AI is a force multiplier throughout the business.

So, AI has literally killed many jobs at CrowdStrike this week. I'm fortunate to be among the survivors, but I don't know for how long.

Generative AI, particularly LLMs, is permeating every aspect of the company. It's in our internal chats. It's integrated into our note-taking tools. It's being used in triage, analysis, engineering, and customer communications. Every week, I'm pinged in an announcement that some new AI capability has been rolled out to me and that I am expected to make use of it. Customers who are paying for live human service packages from us are increasingly getting the output of an LLM instead. Quality Assurance reviewers have started criticizing reviewees for failing to run things through AI tools for things as trivial as spelling and grammar. Check out the front page and count the number of times "AI" is mentioned. It didn't used to be like this.

CrowdStrike is currently achieving record financials. At the time I write this, CRWD is trading at $428.63 in striking range of the stock's 52-week high. The efforts of my colleagues and I to rebuild from the incident of July 19, 2024 have been rewarded with shareholder approval and 500 layoffs. Some of the impacted individuals were recent graduates of 4-year schooling who, in addition to student loans, have moving expenses because they physically relocated to Texas shortly before this RIF occurred.

Many lower-level employees at CrowdStrike are big fans of generative AI; as techy people in a techy job, they fit the bill for that. Even so, many of them have become wary… of what increased AI adoption means for them and their colleagues. Some of the enthusiastic among them are beginning to realize that they're training the means of additional layoffs—perhaps their own.

CrowdStrikers have been encouraged to handle the additional per capita workload by simply working harder and sometimes working longer for no additional compensation on either count. While our Machine Learning systems continue to perform with excellence, I have yet to be convinced that our usage of genAI has been productive in the context of the proofreading, troubleshooting, and general babysitting it requires. Some of the genAI tools we have available to us are just completely useless. Several of the LLMs have produced inaccuracies which have been uncritically communicated to our customers by CrowdStrikers who failed to exhibit due diligence. Those errors were caught by said customers, and they were embarrassing to us all.

I would stop short of saying that the existence of genAI tools within the company is directly increasing the per capita workload, but an argument could be made of it indirectly accomplishing that. The net result is not a lightening of the load as has been so often promised.

Morale is at an all-time low. Many survivors have already started investigating their options to leave either on their own terms or whenever the executives inevitably decide an LLM is adequate enough to approximately replace us.

The company is very proud of its recognitions as an employer. As CrowdStrikers, we used to be proud of it too. Now we just feel betrayed.

“Coding assistants push”

Software engineer, health tech startup.

I work as a software engineer and we've been getting a push to adopt AI coding assistants in the last few months. I tried it, mostly to be able to critique, and found it super annoying, so I just stopped using it. But I'm starting to get worried. Our CEO just posted this in an internal AI dedicated Slack channel. The second message is particularly concerning.

[It’s a screenshot of a message containing a comment from another developer. It reads:]

"I am sufficiently AI-pilled to think that if you aren't using agentic coding tools, then you are the problem. They are good enough now that it's a skills issue. Almost everyone not using them will be unemployed in 2 years and won't know why (since they're the ones on Hacker News saying "these tools never work for me!" and it turns out they are using very bad prompts and are super defensive about it)."

We've had some layoffs long before this AI wave and the company has not picked up the pace in terms of hiring since. I'm sure now they're thinking twice before hiring anyone though. The biggest change was in how the management is enthusiastically incentivizing us to start using AI. First they offered coding assistants for everyone to use, then the hackdays we had every semester turned into a week long hackathon specifically focused on AI projects.

Now we have an engineer, if you can call him that, working on a project that will introduce more than 30k lines of AI generated code into our codebase, without a single unit test. It will be impossible to do a proper code review on this much code and it will become a maintenance nightmare and possibly a security hazard. I don't need to tell you how much management is cheering on that.

“My job hasn't been killed, yet”

Front end software engineer at a major software company.

My job hasn't been killed yet, but there's definitely a possibility that it could be soon. I work for a major software company as a front end software engineer. I believe that there's been AI-related development for about a year and a half. It's a little hard to nail down exactly because I'm one of the few remaining US-based developers and the majority of our engineering department is in India. The teams are pretty siloed and the day-to-day of who's on what teams and what they're doing is pretty opaque. There's been a pretty steady increase of desire and pressure to start using AI tools for a while now. As a result, timelines have been getting increasingly shorter, likewise the patience of upper management. They've tried to create tools that would help with some of the day-to-day repeatable UI pieces that I work on, but the results were unusable from my end and I found that I can create them on my own in the same amount of time.

Around October/November of last year, the CEO and President (who's the former head of Product) had decided to go all-in on AI development and integrate it in all aspects of our business. Not just engineering, but all departments (Sales, Customer Operations, People Operations, etc). Don't get a ton of insight from other departments other than I've heard that Customer Ops is hemorrhaging people and the People Ops sent an email touting that we could now use AI to write recognition messages to each other celebrating workplace successes (insulting and somewhat dystopian). On the engineering side, I think initially there was a push to be an AI leader in supply chain, so there were a lot of training courses, hackathons and (for India) AI-focused off-sites where they wanted to get broad adoption of AI tools and ideas for products that we can use AI in.

Then in February, the CEO declared that what we have been doing is no longer a growth business and we were introducing an AI control tower and agents, effectively making us an AI first company. The agents themselves had names and AI-generated profile pictures of minorities that aren't actually represented in the upper levels of the company, which I find kind of gross. Since then, the CEO has been pretty insistent about AI in every communication and therefore there's an increased downward pressure to use it everywhere. He has never been as involved in the day-to-day workings of the company as he has been about AI. Most consequential is somewhere he has gotten the idea that because code can now be generated in a matter of minutes, whole SAS6 applications, like the ones we've been developing for years, can be built in a matter of days. He's read all these hype articles declaring 60-75% increase in engineering productivity. I guess there was a competitor in one of our verticals that has just come on the scene and done basically what our app can do, but with more functionality. A number things could explain this, but the conclusion has been that they used AI and made our app in a month. So ever since then, it's been a relentless stream of pressure to fully use AI everywhere to "improve efficiency" and get things out as fast as possible. They've started mandating tracking AI usage in our JIRA stories7, the CEO has led Engineering all-hands8 (he has no engineering background), and now he is mandating that we go from idea to release in a single sprint (2 weeks) or be able to explain why we're not able to meet that goal.

I've been working under increasingly more compressed deadlines for about a year and am pretty burned out right now, and we haven't even started pushing the AI warp speed churn that they've proposed recently. It's been pretty well documented how inaccurate and insecure these LLMs are and, for me, it seems like we're on a pretty self-destructive path here. We ostensibly do have a company AI code of conduct, but I don't know how this proposed shift in engineering priority doesn't break every guideline. I'm not the greatest developer in the world, but I try to write solid code that works, so I've been very resistant to using LLMs in code. I want my work to be reliable and understandable in case it does need to be fixed. I don't have time to mess around and go down rabbit holes that the code chatbots would inevitably send me down. So I foresee the major bugs and outages just sky-rocketing under this new status quo. How they pitch it to us is that we can generate the code fast and have plenty of time to think about architecture, keep a good work/life balance, etc.

But in practice, we will be under the gun of an endless stream of 2 week deadlines and management that won't be happy at how long everything takes or the quality of the output. The people making these decisions love the speed of code generation but never consider the accuracy and how big the problem is of even small errors perpetuated at scale. No one else is speaking up to these dangers, but I feel like if I do (well, more loudly than just to immediate low-level managers), I'll be let go. It's pretty disheartening and I would love to leave, but of course it's hard to find another job competing with all the other talented folks that have been let go through all this. Working in software development for so long and seeing so many colleagues accept that we are just prompt generators banging out substandard products has been rough. I'm imagining this must be kind of what it feels like to be in a zombie movie. I'm not sure how this all turns out, but it doesn't look great at the moment.

The one funny anecdote during all this AI insanity is they had someone from GitHub demo do a live presentation on Co-Pilot and the agents. Not only was everything he demoed either unreliable or underwhelming, but he could not stop yawning loudly during his own presentation. Even the AI champions are tired.

Less than a month later, the engineer emailed me a followup.

And I just got laid off yesterday. The reason cited was they need full stack developers and want engineers that are in India, and not for performance. My front-end-focused position was rendered obsolete. Very plausible since they definitely prefer hiring young and less expensive developers abroad. So AI is not technically the direct cause, but definitely a factor in the background. They'll hire a bunch of new graduates to churn out whatever AI solutions that they think they can hype. Annoyingly, they did announce two new AI agents yesterday, again with faces and names of women. The positive is that they did give me a decent severance, so in the short term I'm fine, financially but also that I don't have to deal with the pressure of ridiculous deadlines.

“AI experience”

Edtech worker.

I work for a small edtech startup and do all of our marketing, communications, and social media. I've always enjoyed doing our ed policy newsletter and other writing related projects. My boss absolutely loves AI, but until recently I'd been able to avoid it. A few weeks ago, my boss let me know that all of my content writing would now be done on ChatGPT so I would have more time to work on other projects. He also wants me to use AI to generate images of students, which I've luckily been able to push back on.

Although he says it's a time saver, I don't actually have other projects, so not only am I creating complete slop, but I'm also left with large amounts of time to do nothing. Being forced to use AI has turned a job I liked into something I dread. As someone with a journalism background, it feels insulting to use AI instead of creating quality blog posts about education policy. Unfortunately, as a recent grad, I haven't had much luck finding another job despite applying to hundreds, so for now I have to make do with the situation, but I will say that having to use AI is making me reconsider where I'm working.

“AI makes everything worse”

Senior developer at a cloud company.

I work for a cloud service provider (who will retaliate if you don't post this anonymously, unfortunately), and they're absolutely desperate for the current AI fad to be useful for something.

They're completely ignoring the environmental costs (insane power requirements, draining lakes of freshwater for cooling, burning untold CPU and GPU hours that could be dedicated to something useful instead) because there's a buck to be made. They hope. But they're still greenwashing the company of course.

For cloud companies, AI is a gold rush; until the bubble bursts, they can sell ridiculous amounts of expensive server time (lots and lots of CPU/GPU/memory/storage) and tons of traffic to and from the models. They're selling shovels to the gold miners, and are in a great position to charge rent if someone strikes a vein of usefulness.

But they're desperate for this to keep going. They're demanding we use AI for literally everything in our jobs. Our managers want to know what we're using AI for and what AI "innovations" we've come up with. If we're not using AI for everything, they want to know why not. I don't think we're quite at the point of this being part of our performance evaluations, but the company is famously opaque about that, so who knows. It's certainly something the employees worry about.

My work involves standards compliance. Using AI for any part of it will literally double our work load because we'll have to get it to do the thing, and then carefully review and edit the output for accuracy. You can't do compliance work with vibes. What's the point of burning resources to summarize things when you need to review the original and then the output for accuracy anyway?

I can see a scenario coming fast that's going to set back software development by years (decades? who knows!):

• C-suite: we don't need these expensive senior developers, interns can code with AI

• C-suite: we don't need these expensive security developers, AI can find the problems

• senior developers are laid off, or quit due to terrible working conditions (we're already seeing this)

• they're replaced with junior developers, fresh out of school... cheap, with no sense of work-life balance, and no families to distract them

• all the vibe coding goes straight to production because, obviously, we trust the AI and don't know any better; also we've been told to use AI for everything

• at some point, all the bugs and security vulnerabilities make everything so bad it actually starts impacting the bottom line

• uh oh, the vibe coders never progressed beyond junior skill levels, so nobody can do the code reviews, nobody can find and fix the security problems

• if all the fired senior developers haven't retired or found other jobs (a lot of these people want to get out of tech, because big tech has made everything terrible), they'll need to be hired back, hopefully at massive premiums due to demand

If these tools were generally useful, they wouldn't need to force them on us, we'd be picking them up and running with them.

“then came the tomatoes”

Tech worker at a well-known tech company.

I work at a fairly well-known tech company currently trying to transform itself from a respected, healthy brand to a win-at-all-costs hyperscaler. The result has mostly been a lot of bullshit marketing promises pegged to vaporware, abrupt shifts in strategy that are never explained, and most of all, the rapid degrading of a once healthy, candid corporate culture into one that is intolerant of dissent, enforces constant positivity, and just this week, ominously announced that we are “shifting to a high-performance culture.”

The company leadership also recently (belatedly) declared that “we are going all in on AI.”

I don’t use AI. I morally object to it, for reasons I hardly need to explain to you. And now I feel like I’m hiding plain sight, terrified someone will notice I’m actually doing all my own work.

We’re hiring for new roles and have been explicitly told that no candidate will be considered for *any* job unless they’re on board with AI. Every department has to show how they’re “incorporating AI into their workflows.” I heard through the grapevine that anyone so much as expressing skepticism “does not have a future with the company.”

It is pretty bleak. I’d leave, but I keep hearing it’s the same everywhere.

But then something insane happened.

At the most recent company all-hands, typically the site of the post painful sycophancy, one of our executives gave a speech formally announcing our big AI gambit. The meeting is so big that there is no Zoom chat, so people can only directly react via emojis. At first, the exec’s AI speech was greeted by the typical heart-eyes and confetti emojis, but then I saw there were a few thumbs-down emojis thrown into the mix. This was shocking enough on its own, but then the thumbs-downs multiplied, tens and hundreds of them appearing on the screen, making those few little confettis seem weak and pathetic. I was already floored at this point, and then someone posted the first tomato. It caught on like wildfire until there were wave after wave of virtual tomatoes being thrown at the executive’s head—a mass outcry against being forced to embrace AI at gunpoint. He tried to keep going but his eyes kept darting to the corner of his screen where the emojis appeared, in increasing panic.

It was goddamn inspiring. And while the executives didn’t immediately abandon all their AI plans, they are definitely shaken by what happened, and nervous about mass dissent. As they should be.

Thanks again to every tech worker who shared their story to me, whether it was included here or not—and to every worker who has written in to AIkilledmyjob@pm.me, period. I intend to produce the next installment in coming weeks, so subscribe if below if that’s of interest. And if you’d like to support this work, and receive the paywalled Critical AI reports and special commentary, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. My wonderful paid subscribers are the only reason I am able to do any of this. A million thanks.

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Finally, one more time with feeling: If your job has been impacted by AI, and you would like to share your story as part of this project, please do so at AIkilledmyjob@pm.me. If you’re willing to participate in an on-camera interview, contact us at AIkilledmyjob@perfectunion.us. Thanks everyone—until next time.

It was picked up by outlets like TechCrunch, the Guardian, and TechMeme, did numbers on Reddit, and was shared in industry newsletters and AI blogs. It sparked a lot of debate, the great majority of which was civil, even.

Most importantly, I heard from a lot of people who had stories of their own about the impacts of AI on their working lives. Some left comments on the article, some wrote me emails, some posted their stories on social media, and others still sent me tips about job-killing AI use at their companies in cases that have not yet been made public. I heard stories from medical transcribers, freelance illustrators, graphic designers, marketers, writers, tech workers, and more.

I want to hear yours, too. I think a lot of people do.

The wide-ranging and often impassioned response to this story has encouraged me to try to do more to document, understand, and illuminate how AI is impacting our jobs, the working world, and our daily lives. The first step is hearing those stories. A lot of people I speak with are anxious, afraid, or feel alone in their fears. Some are angry their bosses deemed them or their colleagues expendable; some feel depressed watching what they loved about their jobs disappear. Many feel exploited. Others are frustrated at the new work AI creates. Others feel a loss of self-worth. But these workers are not alone and are certainly not worthless—there are many people experiencing such indignities right now. Assembling and sharing these stories can illuminate what’s happening to our jobs in the AI era, and help us understand the extent of the trend.

So, if you have a story about how AI has impacted your working life, your job, or your workplace, and you’d like to share, please send it to AIKilledMyJob@pm.me. It’s an encrypted ProtonMail account, and I will keep all details private and, if desired, your identity anonymous. I will protect your identity as I would any source. Your message can be as long or as short as you’d like. It can be shared as a tip on background or written with the intent of being shared with readers, here on BLOOD IN THE MACHINE, where I’ve added a new section called AI Killed My Job.

I think there’s great value in sharing these stories. We cannot hold the AI companies or corporate leadership or the managers using AI accountable if we do not know what they’re doing, after all. A researcher has volunteered to help sort the responses, and I’ll use the entire corpus as part of a broader project to understand the impacts of AI-led job loss, degradation, and transformation.

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When I ask if AI killed your job, I don’t mean it literally. “AI” is after all a loose term that describes a broad array of technologies, even though these days it’s usually used to describe generative AI systems, which use large language models to produce text and image output. And “AI” can’t kill any jobs on its own—that’s a management decision. And many felt that even if AI didn’t eliminate their job outright, as it typically does not, it effectively killed it; draining it of value or ruining what made it enjoyable.

In the last week—and over the last couple of years—I’ve heard stories about the ways that bosses, clients, or managers use AI to replace or downgrade rewarding tasks, institute new surveillance measures, try to speed up the rate of work, justify giving workers more work, threaten them with replacement, or otherwise make their lives miserable. And, yes, some people reported being replaced outright by AI systems, either suddenly, as the Duolingo writer and the federal tech worker reported, or after months or years of enduring downgrades and corporate restructuring.

Clearly, there are a lot of such stories out there. I hear more of them every few days as it is. (This is one thing that happens when you write a book defending the historical Luddites and you document the struggles of the new ones.) But I have a feeling I’m just seeing the tip of the iceberg: what this response has shown me is that we are under-reporting, and failing to understand the breadth and scope of the changes generative AI, algorithmic work, and automated systems are leveling on jobs and modern workplaces.

One recurring comment on my original article was that unemployment in general is still high—that the impact of AI has yet to show up in employment statistics. A recent study of workplaces in Denmark found that generative AI seemed to have little impact on total employment. Though I’d like to see a similar study on American workplaces, where employees enjoy fewer protections and employers may be more excitable over AI firms’ pitches—and where DOGE has been the most potent American job-destroyer of 2025 by far—I’m not particularly surprised by the findings.

The point in my piece was that “the AI jobs crisis is…a crisis in the nature and structure of work, more than it is about trends surfacing in the economic data.” Those who are feeling the impacts most are already-precarious freelance workers who tend to be undercounted in jobs data, creative industries, and public servants laid off by DOGE, a project empowered by the logic of AI, and AI-first strategies.

I have interviewed too many artists who are now struggling because their clients have turned to Midjourney or ChatGPT, too many designers now out of work, too many federal workers laid off, pushed out, or threatened by DOGE and its bad AI, too many people squeezed in novel ways, to be able to dismiss this trend as anything other than a significant reshaping of work. How significant is this trend? How far-reaching? How economically damaging to workers, in their own words? How debilitating to their mental health?

These are questions I’d love to answer with your help. This project has been inspired in part by Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by the late anthropologist David Graeber. The backbone of that book comes from testimonials he solicited over email about workers’ bullshit jobs, and why they felt their own jobs were, in fact, bullshit. I hope to accomplish something similar for AI-impacted jobs here.

I am convinced, based on years of interviews and industry observation, that generative AI is driving serious changes in work. Help me, and the rest of the world, understand them, if you can.

So, if you:

-Have lost a job because management said they’re switching to AI
-Seen your clients dry up and suspect or know they use AI-generated output instead
-Have been pushed to use AI systems at work to speed up your productivity
-Have been pushed to use AI at work to speed up productivity after layoffs in your department
-Were forced to use AI as a requirement of your job
-Have seen AI change the day-to-day makeup of your job
-Are concerned that the AI you’re using will result in someone else’s termination
-Worry that AI tools are increasing surveillance in your workplace
-Have any other stories about the use of AI at all

Please do get in touch, and share your story at AIKilledMyJob@pm.me. I will assume that any submissions are 100% confidential, and are not to be viewed by anyone besides myself and the researcher, unless the messages explicitly and clearly state otherwise, or until I reach out and receive permission to share them.

Thank you, and I look forward to reading your stories, learning from them, and, when desired, sharing them with a world being overrun by AI.

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As always, thank you to readers of this newsletter, and to the subscribers who chip in their hard-earned cash to support it. If you’d like to support this work, and projects like this one, every paid supporter goes a long way, and I’m thankful to each of you. Thanks, and more soon.