Did AI kill your job?
If so, I want to hear about it. Send your story to AIKilledMyJob@pm.me
The response to my recent story, “The AI jobs crisis is here, now”, has been pretty overwhelming. The piece, which examines how the language-learning app Duolingo fired its writers and translators to go all-in on AI, how DOGE uses an “AI-first strategy” to justify firing tens of thousands of public servants, and how both fit into a broader trend of executives using AI to erode conditions for creative, civic, and freelance work, has become one of the most-read stories in this newsletter’s history.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you, Brian, for your thoughtful post about this topic, and for the further research and writing you will be doing about it. Pls also consider including research on, and covering, the blitz of industry corporations and individuals who are acting as PR behind AI -- those who are trying to convince the masses that AI is good for humanity, and "just get on board" or you'll miss out out on innovation, the future as it's supposed to be, etc. It's a powerful force that is making a lot of people just give up and give in.
I'm commenting even though none of the above apply to me--I'm a homesteader, no threat of AI horning in on that since there's no money in it. My comment is that the threat to jobs is not my top concern about AI; There are two others--surveillance, of workers, yes, but also of all of us all the time everywhere. And, the fact that AI is not intelligent and can't really do creative work--it can only plagiarize, blending what it steals from multiple sources so it can't be legally charged. It also can't do less creative work as well as the humans it replaces, which will have myriad harmful effects on the people who rely on what humans are now doing. It can't exercise judgement. So a hundred things will become more difficult, more frustrating, less efficient and effective, less pleasurable for virtually all of us. But the people making the decisions SIMPLY DON"T CARE. Billionaires don't depend on any of it--if airports are more dangerous, well, they're flying in private jets; if Social Security becomes riddled with errors and it gets to be a nightmare to try to sign up for it, it will have no effect on them, since their SS earnings are a tiny pittance compared to their stashed wealth. If their data centers and cryptocurrency raise the use of fossil fuels and thus speed catastrophic climate change, well yes that WILL affect them but they think they're going to migrate to sunny Mars or download into an android or some goddamn thing They may not be sure of this but the IMPORTANT thing is that they're making lots of money now. Why would people who have more money than they could spend in 20 lifetimes think making even more money is worth risking everything? because they're mentally ill, that's why. And likely part of the attraction of the Mars and similar fantasies is that they'd be enormously expensive, thus giving them a reason to work so hard at piling up ever more wealth They already own a yacht, a dozen huge homes, designer everything, a trophy wife, and several governments. What's next? They need something to get excited about.