alyaza [they/she]

2025-12-13 17:30:59

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

[...]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.

"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.

^{Brian Merchant (Blood in the Machine)}