"I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry

Copywriters were one of the first to have their jobs targeted by AI firms. These are their stories, three years into the AI era.

Back in May 2025, not long after I put out the first call for AI Killed My Job stories, I received a thoughtful submission from Jacques Reulet II. Jacques shared a story about his job as the head of support operations for a software firm, where, among other things, he wrote copy documenting how to use the company’s product.

“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 wrote. “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 AI adoption mania? 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, to their chagrin who have been forced to use AI.

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.”

Art by Koren Shadmi.

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.

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.

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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.

If things keep progressing at this rate... 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.

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 up 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

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