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Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"
- rfarley04 10mo agoI'm a full time copywriter for SaaS companies and I'm actually finding the opposite. My experience is people are having AI write stuff then trying to massage it themselves. When they can't get it to a point where they're happy with it they eventually just throw up their hands and hire me for pre-AI project scopes with 2025 rates. Not saying that's the experience everywhere, but AI has been much less problematic for me than most of the narratives I've seen online (knock on wood)
- simonw 10mo agoThat's interesting. A problem I have with Brian Merchant's reporting on this is that he put out a call for stories from people who have lost their jobs to AI and so that's what he got. What's missing is a clear indication of the size of this problems. Are there a small number of copywriters who have been affected in this way or is it endemic to the industry as a whole? I'd love to see larger scale data on this. As far as I can tell (from a quick ChatGPT search session) freelance copywriting jobs are difficult to track because there isn't a single US labor statistic that covers that category.
- rfarley04 10mo agoIt's such a difficult vertical to track because there isn't always a clear start and end condition. Drafts get passed around, edited, revised, and cleared by different teams, sometimes with a mixture of writing from in-house, freelancers, external agencies, and AI. Lots of people I talk to can't believe the number of projects that get approved and paid for that never end up going live simply because of red tape.
- MangoToupe 10mo ago> he put out a call for stories from people who have lost their jobs to AI This seems like an inherently terrible way to look for a story to report. Not only are you unlikely to know if you didn't find work because an AI successfully replaced you, but it's likely to attract the most bitter people in the industry looking for someone to blame. And, btw, I hate how steeply online content has obviously crashed in quality. It's very obvious that AI has destroyed most of what passed as "reporting" or even just "listicles". But there are better ways to measure this than approaching this from a labor perspective, especially as these jobs likely aren't coming back from private equity slash-and-burning the industry.
- simonw 10mo agoCollecting personal stories from people - and doing background reporting to verify those people are credible - is a long standing journalistic tradition. I think it's valuable, and Brian did it very well here (he's a veteran technology reporter). It doesn't tell the whole story though. That's why I always look for multiple angles and sources on an issue like this (here that's the impact of AI on freelance copywriting.)
- tmoertel 10mo ago> This seems like an inherently terrible way to look for a story to report. But it’s probably a great way create a story to generate clicks. The people who respond to calls like this one are going to come from the extreme end of the distribution. That makes for a sensational story. But that also makes for a story that doesn't represent the reality as most people will experience it, rather the worst case.
- readthenotes1 10mo agoI can't remember which pundit said it, but his theory was that only the best would stay employed and that they would be valued for their high skill
- thomascountz 10mo agoI think this might be what many people think. Which is what brings upon problems of self-worth. However, "best" and "high skill" aren't always the reason why companies value work and workers, i.e. the economy is not a meritocracy.
- bdcravens 10mo agoPerhaps, but then it becomes a buyer's market, and salaries will reflect that.
- MangoToupe 10mo ago> and salaries will reflect that. Hilariously naive.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- iechoz6H 10mo agoIsn't the implication that salaries will go down, but your response is assuming the GP is naively thinking salaries will go up?
- morkalork 10mo agoI suspect that for every case like yours, there's dozens of companies of lower quality where the AI slop is "good enough"
- coffeefirst 10mo agoI expect we’ll see a lot of this as genAI content is seen as shlock. But we’re also seeing a lot of schlock…
- e-dant 10mo agoI have more of a problem with poor governance than strong automation. The economy should provide us all food and shelter, beyond that, do what you love.
- moltar 10mo agoI think the article is about “copywriters” who aren’t true copywriters but those who were writing junk articles for SEO. Once AI can write proper compelling converting copy then I’ll change my mind.
- Mistletoe 10mo agoHow do you know you aren’t reading it every day?
- moltar 10mo agoBecause I tried using LLMs to write a compelling copy for a landing page and it’s just not that great. I tried a lot. A real copywriter will do a lot of research about your ICP and write targeted copy.
- nubg 10mo agoThis tell us more about your (lacking) skills at using AI than the state of AI tools themselves. You're probably using the free lobotomized versions of LLMs, and shooting a one-off short ambiguous prompt and wondering why it didn't turn out the way you imagined. Meanwhile people spend hundreds of dollars on pro LLM access and learn to use tool calling, deep research, agents and context engineering.
- jacknews 10mo agoIf a human component is required in addition to the cheaply machine-automated part, that belies the claim that 'most of the work has already been done'. The human part, turning it from slop to polished, becomes the most important part of the work, and then (and in any case) should be paid at human rates.
- pessimizer 10mo agoThis doesn't really address anything, though. The human part will be 10x more productive when they're polishing than when they're having to start with a blank page, and now nine nearly as competent, experienced people have been fired and are offering to work for less than you're being paid. Poof! It's now a minimum wage job, and has barely gotten any easier. They can actually just hire the worst of you (who will do unpaid overtime, and let you call him a dummy when you're upset), because it's not a big deal that he's only 5x as fast as you used to be compared to your 10x as fast as you used to be. They can't even attract that much business now because the lowest end of the market completely disappeared and is doing it at home by themselves. Prepress/typesetting work went from a highly-specialized job that you spent years mastering and could raise a family with to a still moderately difficult job that paid just above minimum wage within a single generation, just due to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Those tools don't even generate anything resembling a final product, they just make the job digital instead of physical. In the case of copywriting, AI instantly generates something that a lazy person could ship with.
- fluidcruft 10mo agoAgreed. We seem to be here: "Gamblers generate slop, businessmen sell it as 'AI-powered.'" Something important is missing.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoHmm. "Commoditize your complement". That is, if you're selling razor blades, you want the handle and the shaving cream to be cheap. Well then, if you're turning slop into polished, then you want the slop to be cheap. And AI makes it much cheaper.
- thePhytochemist 10mo ago
- constantcrying 10mo agoHaving jobs for the sake of having jobs is a ridiculous proposition. Copywriting is largely obsolete. Sure, it sucks to be in that profession right now, but what alternative is there. A Machine does your job far cheaper than you and even right now it is "good enough" to replace everything but the most complex and demanding writing.
- dymk 10mo agoGovernment job programs were a defining feature of economic prosperity during the New Deal. Saying jobs for the sake of jobs are bad isn’t historically true.
- jaccola 10mo agoPeople doing jobs with no inherent value still need food, shelter, healthcare,… all provided by other people. Further, the cost difference (for there must be a cost difference or we wouldn’t have anyone choosing AI) must come from somewhere, that money is not being used to pay people (or even the same person) doing productive work. I can see some limited scenarios in up and coming industries or strategically important industries where government job programs could be at least argued for. The copywriting industry is clearly not either of those.
- dymk 10mo agoClearly those jobs have "inherent value", or The Market would not have sunk a few billion into automating away the people that do them. These are jobs that people have been doing for years, and been getting paid money to do. Look at how things went for the "Learn to code" workforce. They were told that software would be a valuable skill to have, and sunk a lot of time and money into fronted coding bootcamps. The job market in 2025 looks very different with Sonnet 4.5, which is particularly good at frontend code. What skills would you tell all those copywriters to go re-train in? How confident are you that won't be useless in 10, 15 years? Maybe you can say that they should have trained in other fields of software, but hindsight is 20/20. I am not saying automation is bad, or that the jobs we have today should be set in stone and nothing change. But, there will be society level ramifications if we take some significant fraction of the workforce and tell them they're out of a job. Society can absorb the impact of a small fraction of the workforce going out of a job, but not a big one.
- bsndjdkd 10mo ago[flagged]
- rvz 10mo agoRemember, it is the advent of grift. It's time to get your bag before the AI bubble pops.
- bsndjdkd 10mo agoI love the dudes self righteousness at least.
- simonw 10mo agoThis is a bit of an odd post to attach that comment to, but here you go: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures
- _zagj 10mo agoBesides the fact that you do have conflicts of interest (disclosing them doesn't negate them), you don't seem to understand that given how all of the Big AI players have shown themselves to be ruthless and shamelessly dishonest (hoovering up people's creative work without concern for its licensing, aggressively scraping websites to the point of DDOSing them, disregarding robots.txt and using residential IPs to disguise their traffic, and all the while denying everything), that when you assume the role of their most enthusiastic shill, people will naturally start to doubt your integrity. EDIT: To put it another way, I remember a talk where you dismissed people's concerns about their data being used for training after AI was integrated into a product, citing the company's (a big AI player) denial--as if that should just be taken at face value, because they says so--a perspective that many of us view as naive or disingenuous.
- simonw 10mo agoThe purpose of disclosure is to allow people to make their own decisions about how trustworthy I am as a source of information. If I started rejecting access to early models over a desire to avoid conflicts of interest my coverage would be less useful to people. I think most of my regular readers understand that. I was responsible for one of the first widely read reports on the ethics of model training back in 2022 when I collaborated with Andy Baio to cover Stable Diffusion's unlicensed training data: https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-used-to-train-stable-diffusions-image-generator/ https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-... Calling me "their most enthusiastic shill" is not justified. Have you seen what's out there on LinkedIn/Twitter etc? The reason I show up on Hacker News so often is that I'm clearly not their most enthusiastic shill.
- simonw 10mo agoMy additional commentary on this one is not worth much - I suggest reading the original article instead: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-until-the https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-u...
- AndrewKemendo 10mo agoEven that short changes the original source: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-until-the https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-u... I bookmarked the series which looks exactly like what everyone in tech is saying ISN’T happening: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/s/ai-killed-my-job https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/s/ai-killed-my-job But I’m sure somebody will blow this off as “it’s only three examples and is not really representative” But if it is representative… “then it’s not as bad as other automation waves” or if it is as bad as other automation waves… “well there’s nothing you can do about it” Anecdotally I was in an Uber yesterday on the way to a major Metropolitan airport and we passed a Waymo. I asked the Uber driver how they felt about Waymo and Uber collaborating and if he felt like it was a threat to his job. His answer was basically “yes it is but there’s nothing anybody can do about it you can’t stop technology it’s just part of life.” If that’s how people who are being replaced feel about it, while still continuing to do the things necessary to train the systems, then there will be assuredly no human future (at least not one that isn’t either subsistence or fully machine integrated) because the people being replaced don’t feel like they have the capacity to stand up to it.
- Lerc 10mo agoThe world changes and jobs cease to exist. Historically there hasn't been a great deal of support for those who lose their jobs to change. While there are issues that are AI specific, I don't feel as if this is one of them. This happens for many reasons, of which AI is just one. In turn, I think this means that the way to address the problem of job loss should not be AI soecific. If it turns out that AI does not create more jobs than are lost; that will be a new thing. I think that can happen, but on a longer timeframe. When most jobs can be done by AI, we will need a societal change to deal with that. That will be where people need a livelihood, not necessarily a job. I have read pieces nearly a hundred years old saying this, there are almost certainly much earlier writings that identify this needs to be addressed. There will undoubtedly be a few individuals that will seek to accumulate wealth and power who aim to just not employ humans. I don't think that can happen on a systemic scale because it would be too unstable. Two of the things that supports wealth inequality is 1) people do not want to risk what they currently have, and 2) they are too busy surviving to do anything about it. A world where people lose their jobs and have no support results in a populace with nothing to lose and time to act. That state would not last long.
- conductr 10mo agoA couple friends have been laid off in fields similar, where AI is excelling and reducing demand for labor significantly, and it seems they’re mostly unaware and saying/thinking it’s the job market that is tough / time of year and maybe it will improve in 2026 as budgets are executed. I’ve not had the heart to tell them they will likely need to change careers. And that’s if they can, in my opinion the faster they realize that the better off they will be. I don’t think the laypersons familiarity with AI right now understand that this is full out reductive in labor and there is no substitute.
- vintagedave 10mo ago> I’ve not had the heart to tell them they will likely need to change careers ... in my opinion the faster they realize that the better off they will be. I understand your reluctance. Yet I think, if you believe this, you should have that hard conversation sooner rather than later.
- conductr 10mo agoI understand that but I don’t feel they’re ready to hear what I have to say on it. In a way, I’m waiting for the right time. I have to preserve our relationship and try to be optimistic for them as a supportive friend for the time being.
- singpolyma3 10mo agoThe problem isn't getting rid if people's jobs. Jobs are not inherently valuable. The problem is we have not built a society or economy where everyone can thrive regardless of their employment.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo agoThe only thing that seems hopeful is that people are finally talking about it at mass scale. I promise you as an anarchist agitator that is unbelievably new just even in the last couple years and precisely what usually happens prior to actual direct action. My fellow anarchists hate the fact that Donald Trump did more for anarchist-socialist praxis than every other socialist writer in history.
- kaikai 10mo agoPlease don’t speak for all anarchists like your individual perspective is some kind of truth.
- dangus 10mo agoIn addition, abrupt changes in industry landscape are problematic. The expectation for everyone to retrain and do something else is not necessarily reasonable, especially in an environment that does not have much of a social support system for education, training, and extended periods away from the workforce. And we all know that the market doesn't magically make replacement jobs better or the same as the previous ones.
- everdrive 10mo ago>The problem is we have not built a society or economy where everyone can thrive regardless of their employment. The way I'd read this sentiment is that the arrangement of society is ultimately arbitrary and if we could only choose a different system we could by truly free. I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly or not. That said, my impression is that people will not really be able to get away from something like that looks like traditional jobs. The core traits seem to be group dynamics, hierarchical competition, status-attainment -- all where resources are not infinite nor are opportunities for status. We've already had sufficient technological advances such that people would not need to do much labor, but functionally speaking I just don't think people can organize themselves into _any_ possible arrangement. I think the potential arrangements that could exist are limited by nature.
- icegreentea2 10mo agoWhen I feel deeply cynical about the quality of our modern life, I imagine that one of the reasons it's so easy for us to "settle" for the "good enough" output of AI in certain areas, especially around corporate copywriting, art, and yes perhaps even code is that these areas already fundamentally suck. I believe that good skillful writing, drawing, or coding, by a human who actually understands and believes in what they're doing can really elevate the merely "good" to excellent. However, when I think about the reality of most corporate output, we're not talking about "good" as a baseline level that we are trying to elevate. We're usually talking about "just barely not crap" in the best case, to straight up garbage in maybe a more common case. Everyone understands this, from the consumer to the "artist" (perhaps programmer), to the manager, to the business owner. And this is why using AI slop is so easy to embrace in so many areas. The human touch was previously being used in barely successful attempts to put a coat of paint over some obvious turds. They were barely succeeding anyways, the crap stunk through. May as well let AI pretend to try, and we'll keep trying until the wheels finally fall off.
- mvkel 10mo agoI can't help but wonder if this is a bit like a few years ago when comedians were complaining that nobody was laughing at their jokes anymore. They realized that it was a mandate to figure out how to be funny again, because what was considered "funny" had changed. In this instance, and probably most instances of art/craft, copywriters need to figure out what is creative again, because what is considered "creative" has changed. I could also see this being the journey that AI customer support took, where all staff were laid off and customers were punted to an AI agent, but then the shortcomings of AI were realized and the humans were reintroduced (albeit to a lesser degree). I suspect the pendulum will swing back to AI as the memory problems are resolved though.
- omnimus 10mo agoThe problem is that most copywriting is not and shouldn't be very creative. Often times it's just outsiders who know how to make public communication clear. The sad part is that the managers deciding on using AI are the ones who rarely understand what is good public communication - that's why they were hiring someone to help them with it. With AI they get some text that seems legit but the whole process of figuring out why&how is simply skipped. It might sometimes work but it's doubtful it builds knowledge in the organisation.
- szundi 10mo agoIt is actually quite hard to copywrite if you’re doing a good job. Also firing people for a minimal bonus is always a lot of people are going to go for
- mvkel 10mo ago> it's just outsiders who know how to make public communication clear I'd argue this requires a great deal of creativity. It's how we got "1,000 songs in your pocket." The problem is us, on the consumer side. We are in an era of content hyperinflation. That was true before AI became ubiquitous
- omnimus 10mo ago
- zeroonetwothree 10mo agoWhy don’t we see it in the aggregate job data? Could it be that people sometimes lose jobs for “reasons” but that’s just the normal flow of the economy? Until there’s some effect on actual unemployment rates I wouldn’t be worried.
- burnerRhodov2 10mo agoEmployment stats are designed to measure economy-wide shifts, not early, localized, white-collar disruptions. The sampling will smooth those effects away until they’re large. CPS samples 60k households per month to represent ~150+ million workers. Households stay in the sample 4 months, out 8, back 4. Copywriters will get smoothed out in the aggregate, and the definition will mask this. Even if you work one hour, you are technically employed. If you are not actively looking for work for more than a month, you are also not technically unemployed. Unemployment data is a lagging indicator for detecting recessions not early technological displacement in white-collar niches.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo agoThere are some claims that an increasing percentage of employment is comprised of lower paid and more precarious gig workers, e.g. from https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirkogunrinde/2025/11/18/gig-economy-attracting-more-workers-as-layoffs-increase-goldman-sachs-report-says/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirkogunrinde/2025/11/18/gig-ec... "Hours worked on gig platforms in 2025 have increased, even as payroll growth has slowed, suggesting more workers have taken up gig work during a cooling labor market, according to a report released by Goldman Sachs."
- mmooss 10mo agoShouldn't the OP link to the original story, not a short blog post referencing it? https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-until-the https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-u...