[…]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.
It’s funny how completely opposite to this my experience over the past couple of years has been. Twice now I’ve been practically begging my managers to let me use AI-based tools to make my work easier, they’ve responded “no, we don’t want AI touching any of our stuff for vague legal paranoia reasons”, and then the company suffered a collapse and everyone got laid off.
I call BS. They almost definitely did not collapse solely because they insisted on not using AI in the way you proposed.
If you want to argue, be my guest, but you have to be more specific than “they didn’t use AI as I told them, now they’re bankrupt”. Sounds like correlation to me.
Did I say otherwise?
This feels like the ending to most stories these days. My friend’s company shoved AI down his throat, and then the company suffered a collapse and everyone got laid off.