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

I spent 15 or so years writing the content that goes on websites. I had a range of clients, from investment advisors to life coaches to nutrition coaches to people who sold lingerie for men. I had an advantage with some clients because of my engineering degree, so I wasn't afraid of numbers or to dig deep on technical topics.

I rage quit my first job doing this (long story), worked in a warehouse for a year or so, then took another job writing websites. Same deal. I hadn't been in that job for 10 months before our CEO (who inherited the company from his dad) "discovered" generative AI software. Suddenly they wanted the software to write everything and me to "edit" it.

I hated every second of it, and I guess it showed. Soon after, I was fired. The CEO was going to let the software write the website content so he could focus on his newest "baby," a free-to-consumer print (yes, print) magazine. So I went back to my warehouse job, because jobs doing what I did were suddenly nonexistent. The print magazine my former CEO was so passionate about kept getting thinner. Then they started charging for it. I don't know any more than that, but I do hope he is having a terrible time.

Didn't lose it to AI, but did lose it because of AI. I was an editor for a website that relied on affiliate links for revenue and once traffic dropped because of AI overviews, they were screwed. Seems a lot of publishers were in the same boat. The buyers tried to hire me back on a freelance basis but didn't want to pay even half what I had been earning. Lol.

Now learning other skills like coding but seems like that might be a waste of time, too 😅. I have actually also been finding useful cases for AI and educating myself on it so hoping that will help. And applying for "communications" instead of editing because they're related and those jobs actually still exist.

Luckily it was just my side hustle, although a lucrative one. I used to be a notetaker for technical meetings, including some remote meetings. Then various programs rolled out AI transcription services. The results are not as good as what I was producing, and actually have critical errors not-infrequently (did you know can and can't sound extremely similar when spoken in a room with poor acoustics???) - but I can't really expect people to be willing to pay my rates when there's something literally free that produces about 70% of the quality, and I wasn't interested in doing it for lower rates, so there went that side hustle. Even in government agencies that couldn't use the programs it still devalued the perception of my work and what someone would be willing to pay for it.

For all the endless talk about AI replacing people, I’d love to see some concrete examples of how much that has proven successful for the companies. Everyone seems to hate AI customer service and some places have already walked that back. I’ve seen stories of other businesses that fired all their copywriters etc only to have to hire people back to fix the slop.

In my personal experience it hasn’t fully replaced people, but it’s being forced down so many people’s throats and workflows, with the expectation that they should be able to produce much more work using the AI output, even though its still-constant mistakes invite a lot of risk across many industries and often add in more labor having to fact check/fix said mistakes.

Aholes who had seen tiktoks saying that they could be rich beyond their wildest dreams with no effort bombarded my very favorite writing gig. It got to the point where they had to halt submissions because those AI tester things weren’t great- and they just wanted to figure out a fair way of doing things.

Not lost yet.. but insurance. I feel like the only reason we have people on our team is so that people calling in aren't talking to a robot. Other than that, claims, emails, appeals, medical record readings are all done by Ai. Boss says we need to focus on the important things which is living up to customer expectations.

So to have claims done by the day cause now everyone is advertising how quick claims can get done.

As time goes on our teams get smaller. Even replaced our whole training department for new comers.
Your voice is now analyzed and used for grading for your reviews. It's also getting stored and sold as data.


It's not a good thing guys. Patience is a good thing to have and tech has cut that short on a lot of people.

I lost my job to outsourcing and “AI.” I was a Technical Artist, the person who takes/makes game assets, makes them compatible with a game engine, gets them into the game, and gets them looking right and set up for programmers/engineers. I have AI in quotes because I was let go on the CEOs assumption that I could be replaced with AI, not that it can actually do my job. Then my job was outsourced. I suspect a lot of people are being let go just based on the assumption that AI can replace them.

I was a copywriter. Fun stuff too- people who were making their own fantasy worlds for video games/ dnd games/ board games approached me to rewrite their rule system in a flavour text way.

It was good fun, and helped fund myself thru university. I dont remember what the pay was, but it was decent considering how annoying and time consuming it was to make game rules sound interesting!

Yeah, as soon as chat gpt launched, i lost most of my clients. Why pay me for 5hrs of work to do what a prompt will do for free, i guess.

Lost my job as a copywriter/content writer. I've thankfully settled into a strategy role on how to use content to achieve things instead. That's something AI hasn't quite figured out yet.

I was replaced as they thought AI could come up with better content than I could. They asked me to use it, and admittedly, it helped a lot to brainstorm very basic ideas (after checking it hadn't suggested plagiarised copy), refine them into something cool, and share that in kick-off meetings to build upon with the team of creatives.

But they read it as "AI is doing the work." and so ditched me.

They hadn't actually tested to see if it could work without me, and when it came to it, it fell flat. Since then, they've defaulted to the most generic, soulless tone of voice. Instead of introducing interesting, attention grabbing content, they just put the title of the product in instead and send it out. For a heritage company in business for 180+ years to not have a brand voice... ouch.

Fair enough. Money will always win, but I do laugh when all the companies that use AI see it as the second coming, yet also complain that their tone of voice and branding seems to have just fallen off a cliff in the previous years. They can't seem to connect those dots. Or I suspect they don't want to. Or, more likely, it doesn't matter to them.

I'd say it's a lesson about modern business leaders, and one that I don't see enough people understanding. It's no longer about having some respect for your product or customers, offering something of quality to the world, or offering staff a livelihood and career, nor is it about doing some kind of good in the time we're here. It's only about money.

My advice to those struggling to understand this... is stop trying so hard to prove your worth to these parasites.

Stop pushing to improve your output, just press the button on the robot.
Stop innovating, just press the button on the robot.
Stop trying to impress and showcase your ability, just press the button on the robot.

Keep your creativity for yourself. You'll be paid or laid off either way.

System Specialist, lots of stuff got automated and our department was halved. Before that I lost all income from my translation/subtitling side gig.