50 Workers Affected By AI Share How They Lost Their Jobs And Clients

I lost mine to automation - that I'd written myself. Someone once told me "If you're a programmer and your job is repetitive, that means you're bad at programming", because you should have automated the repetitive stuff.

Most of my job was pretty repetitive, so I automated it. That worked fine for over a decade, until I made the awful mistake of writing some documentation for the automation. I lost my job the same month.

ubstantialBass9524:

I’ve automated a lot of the boring parts of my job but luckily there are parts that are impossible (ever changing) to automate (they would cost far too much and then you’d have to pay far too much to pay a specialized programmer to maintain it with the changes)
Anyway our developer always has people who fight against automating parts of their job because they don’t want to get fired (I know at least 1 who 100% would get fired) and he says he has no idea why they are worried look how easy it’s made my job. Mhm yeah no clue why they don’t want you touching their stuff.

I was a full time visual artist. The commissions dried up when people started using ChatGPT to make all their images, flyers, posters, etc.

DannyDirewolf:

I was in 2D animation for 7 years. Some of my co workers lost their jobs a few years ago, then I lost my job a year and a half ago and now my supervisors are losing their jobs. All because of AI. I've moved on to traditional art.

I'll let you know within the year. My leadership team started developing it and expecting half or more of us to be eliminated.

Partners company just did a large round of layoffs due to restructuring for AI.

All those jobs are still done by people but the company has to justify their huge AI bill by cutting their workforce.

I worked for a company where the CEO decided we had to become an “AI-first” company. (The problem space was definitely not “AI-first”.

We “had” to all start using AI in everything, and then one day they let go the entire QA department, the entire sales department, a big chunk of the software engineering group, and the post-sales group.

None of those groups had “AI” solutions built to take over. I’ve already seen customer complaints where bugs have gotten out into the wild, so good luck with that.

164cm:

The exact same thing happened in my company, CEO even publicly introduced that we’re going AI-first from now on and 250 people were fired in a single day.
I personally still kept my job, but quit now a month later as this was a cherry on top of horrible business decisions I wanted to do nothing with.

I was hit with the 3 punch combo. Outsource to Romania. Automation. And yep, I'm the one who trained the Romanians and helped write the automation to "make our jobs a little less taxing". Fired without notice after 11 years.

Have no loyalty to your company. They will drop you without hesitation to save a buck. You and your family aren't human beings to them.

That being said, I was over worked and under paid. Since losing my job, I've now gotten two full time jobs I can work simultaneously, remote, and have over doubled my income in less than a month. Don't get comfortable out there people!

Copywriter here.

I was effectively replaced by AI over a 1-2 year period beginning in the first half of 2022.

I was earning a comfortable salary writing ad copy, web pages, pitch decks and more, and it all got scooped up by a single paid generative AI subscription (Gemini, I believe).

I tried freelancing after I was let go, but the commercial writing discipline had changed way too much.

I’m now going back to school.

…at 46.

Winky_the_houseelf:

32yo copywriter here... what are you switching to? I feel pretty bleak about my future in copy but nothing else I ever wanted to do other than writing.

OP:

Nursing!

I worked for a major US based insurance carrier. I wasn’t actually fired, but they started pushing a lot of people out the door and I left before I could be next.

For the last few years, AI has been the big push. Being able to generate a policy without ever needing to speak to a human, and if you file a claim, being able to submit photos, get an estimate and payout instantaneously and with minimal human contact was the goal. So they started implementing fully automated systems, laying off the most tenured employees, and driving up the workload for everyone else.

In my department (the fraud department), they started using AI to scrape claim files, looking for fraud indicators to generate cases and then assign them out. It worked ok for some types of cases, but terribly for most others… but the company didn’t care, they laid off the entire intake team.

Company-wide, they reworked our metrics to be impossible to meet, then started routinely firing the bottom performers. Everyone (including me) saw the writing on the wall and started looking elsewhere.

I can’t speak for the rest of the company, but I suspect they are going to soon get hit with some massive lawsuits because AI and new employees make a lot of mistakes, and you can’t make mistakes on contractual things like this. Too bad they laid off most of the legal team and switched the entire HR department to AI. For my small department, they lost centuries worth of experience along with most of their employees, and they are getting hit really hard by fraud rings that they used to be industry leaders in combatting. Too bad everyone who knew how to deal with them was fired or driven away.

I won’t say who the company is but if your insurance company’s mascot is green and animated, you should know what your premiums are going to.

HotWing8916:

That is just sad. And I doubt the 15% or more savings on AI is going to translate to lower premiums for consumers. Ai the age of the grifters.

I helped set up a data science algorithm for when to give out loans to a smaller bank and once I set it up they said we'll have AI take it from here. They were using illegal fields as well to determine who got loans.

My wife lost her career as a copywriter and editor. All her clients switched to AI, and they usually have a single human oversee it. Every time we see an obviously AI-written ad or training video, my wife bristles.

Detention Deputy here:

Idk how AI will replace me, but I can definitely see it being invested in and used as a tool in the corrections landscape.

Sad-Sail-3413:

AI surveillance and auto alarm/warning when prisoners act "out of range" maybe.

This is fresh for me, I was laid off on 3rd October. I’m a social media manager. My company closed down the entire Brand department, including designers and copywriters.

They thought AI could produce all the social media content. Which it technically can, but the content is terrible. In September my content had reached over 3m people - the content they’ve posted in October has reached about 45k people so far and already generated some pretty negative feedback from the community.

Anyway they realised very quickly that AI can’t post that content, so they’ve taken me back as a freelancer 2 days per week to manage the channels without having to produce any of the written or visual content.

Very strange times.

I haven't lost my job but finding one is *really hard* because it seems 1/4th of the advertised now require AI to a high level. Context: GPT was only released 3 years ago, and took off 2 years ago, so no-one has a lot of experience except those very few people who worked in Data & AI beforehand, which was a small subset of the tech community.

So whilst I'm no slouch, not having a track record of AI implementation success stories under my belt makes me look less attractive as a candidate.

I worked for a content creation marketplace, we matched up people who needed a lot of content written with people in a community if over 2000 writers. 20 million dollar company to almost 0 in 6 months.

I was let go during a mass layoff where they blamed shifting resources towards AI. Got 8 months severance and landed a new job in 6 months selling AI. lolz.

Software engineer here, saw the writing on the wall when gpt 3.5 first released and reconverted my skills and energy into learning everything i possibly could about this technology as fast as possible, left my senior swe position at a big company to work full time building agents at another big company, and now i'm very in demand and getting paid big bucks

I have adhd and it's hell on earth in every day life, but sometimes it allows me to see patterns before everyone else and act ahead of time before s**t hits the fan.

I'm a graphic designer, what do you think happened?

Not really a job, but a past time. I liked trolling Reddit posts, but now with AI bots, I can't get in there fast enough. All of the really good zings have already flooded the OP. All I can add is a lame thumbs up or tag a vote.

I worked in tech support for 16 years. After Covid I noticed it was getting harder and harder to find work in my field. Since 2021 I’ve applied at HUNDREDS of places and rarely ever get a call back, or even a courtesy email. I started to suspect AI recruiting tools were rejecting my resume for arbitrary reasons. It’s true that I had a couple jobs I only lasted a year at, but I don’t think that should completely invalidate me as an employee. I was making $135k 4 years ago working for a large tech company, and now I can’t even find full time work. I work part time in a mall and need to find a 2nd job if I’m going to survive. So I don’t think my position was replaced with AI agents, but I’m fully convinced AI tools are keeping me underemployed. I lost my house, my car, my mental health, and most of my possessions all because I don’t fit the 100% perfect criteria for a remote tech job I have lots of experience in.

i_suckatjavascript:

Start using AI to help you write your resume, it’ll help you find what’s missing and help you put the language on your resume better.

I had a part-time job for a local private jet hire company. I was the sole person meticulously writing blog posts. It might sound redundant, but due to the age of people booking flights with us (boomers), they loved it.

One part of the editing process was fact-checking, think statistics on bookings per year, updates to safety advice, etc. A year passes with the blog growing month to month, yet they decided to get rid of me and write the posts with AI. Every single post had inaccuracies and promised more than what I remember we could deliver.

I checked the other day, and the company removed the blog entirely since nobody was reading it anymore. I wonder why.