"I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Technological unemployment
2 min read
The article documents real cases of workers displaced by AI automation. This Wikipedia article provides historical context on how technology has displaced workers throughout history, from the Luddites to modern automation, offering perspective on whether current AI displacement follows historical patterns or represents something new.
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Race to the bottom
14 min read
The article describes how clients accept 'good enough' AI output because it's cheaper, driving down wages and quality standards. This economic concept explains the competitive dynamic where businesses lower standards to cut costs, directly relevant to the copywriters' experience of declining rates and degraded work conditions.
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Deskilling
16 min read
Jacques explicitly worries about how entry-level workers will gain experience when AI handles tasks that previously trained humans. Deskilling is the labor economics concept describing how technology can eliminate the need for skilled labor and prevent workers from developing expertise, directly addressing his concern.
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 told me. “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 ...
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