6 ms·

Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry

71 points by thm 10mo ago

wccrawford 10mo ago
Brutal. I think AI led to my being laid off as a software developer, too. It's not quite so clear as the examples here for copywriters, but the company was very interested in using AI to ease the workload, and I can't even say I disagreed with it. I was using it myself. I can't even paint them in a sinister light. They couldn't afford me, and now they had a way to get all the work done with their other developers that were less senior. They were clearly sad to let me go, but they didn't see that they had any choice financially. They weren't a big FAANG company with jillions of dollars. They only had a couple dozen employees. I do wonder how people are going to get to be senior anything in the future, though. It's only going to be people who are really into it that are willing to work that hard to make it happen. The alternative, AI, is just so much easier than it's hard to justify putting that much effort into learning it, unless it's your thing.
- btreecat 10mo ago
  Was being let go better than renegotiation of your salary?
  - oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
    I would say "yes" because a) they don't have to demean themselves by racing to the bottom against an AI b) they no longer have to work for such a scummy company. (Of course, I'm not being 100% serious, and your personal financial situation may be at odds with the tone of this comment)
  - wccrawford 10mo ago
    Oh, I tried. They didn't see it working out, and after a couple months to reflect, I agreed with their position on that, too.
- happytoexplain 10mo ago
  >They couldn't afford me The problem is that in most cases businesses can afford you, but they choose to be "unable to". It's called budgeting, and the ceiling only represents existential limits for small or dying businesses. The rest of the time, it is defined only to maximize profit, which means using their power to shift the negative part of economic changes onto individuals as much as mathematically possible, rather than the business suffering proportionately.
  - Schlagbohrer 10mo ago
    Engineers (both HW and SW) are often fantastically bad at understanding how business works, including where their salary comes from and how much value they are producing, versus how small the % of the value they produced is which gets returned to them as their salary. This problem is acute with older hardware and manufacturing engineers who drank all the corporate propaganda they've been fed for decades. I once worked with a senior manufacturing engineer who didn't clock his overtime because he didn't want the huge, multinational corporation we worked for to go bankrupt.
  - wccrawford 10mo ago
    I knew enough about their financials that I'm convinced they really couldn't afford somebody, and I was the most expensive. No amount of "budgeting" was going to cover those unexpected circumstances, which they had already tried to work through in other ways. I want to be mad, but I can't.
    - JeanMarcS 10mo ago
      IMHO you can and should. AI is a great assistant. Letting go the more experienced dev is a bad move. We work in a field where you should understand what it is you're doing. We had a wave of "dev" who where told that assembling libraries and API as Lego is the way. It's only a sub part. Now with the AI fuzz, people think it's kind of magic and do everything by its own. It's not. You can gain a lot of time with AI if you know how to prompt and are capable to understand what it spits out. But beting the future of your business on less experimented junior for saving a couple thousand dollars is not a clever move. (Again, my opinion)
- sixtyj 10mo ago
  Senior. This is the most important. Nobody wants to stop using AI but people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future and people bored by AI. But as there will be an interrupted continuity the next generation will be… Competition is hard so we have to use AI to stay competitive - last time I read similar was… testimonies of concentration camp guards when they were asked why they overlooked atrocities.
  - mooreds 10mo ago
    > people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future Can you tell me more? Everything I've read indicates it affects juniors/new devs more. Is that what you mean by a 'senior-free' future? One in which there are no seniors in 10-20 years because there are no juniors now? Or something else?
    - sixtyj 10mo ago
      You have answered your question. If we don’t accept/hire juniors (as companies think they are inefficient) to their first positions then how can they become seniors in their branch? TBH I don’t have a solution for that.
thisisauserid 10mo ago
[flagged]
seu 10mo ago
Can we please stop saying "AI is doing this", "AI is doing that", and instead point out at the companies and individuals that are shoveling AI down our throats as the ones that are decimating industries or destroying jobs, almost exclusively for their own economical benefit? Framing it as "AI" only leads to ignoring the responsibility of those who are making those decisions. It's exactly the same argument behind justifying things as "market forces": it allows everything and makes nobody responsible for it.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- nepture73 10mo ago
  This is deliberate from both the left and the right to keep costs down. "AI" is ambient and no one can pin the blame on anyone. In my industry -- software engineering -- AI is being blamed for a job market that tumbled a year before GPT even entered the mainstream. There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. Nevertheless, it is easy to blame AI because it doesnt force us to really examine the causes and thus no policy changes would result. In SWE-land, we done hire people because of three reasons 1. better open source means you dont need to build it on your own 2. More h1/h4/opt visa workers means you can have loyal and under-market pay workers without attrition risk (even Trump with all his power couldnt tackle this lobby) 3. offshore -- us healthcare and benefits are too expensive, easier to just send the work to other countries
  - voidnap 10mo ago
    > There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. In 2020 there was a global pandemic called COVID-19 that had a pronounced affect on the world economy. Stimulus cheques were given to companies to keep them afloat through this time. Tech companies spent that new capital on hiring and them layed off a lot of workers when they weren't able to sustain them. A big reason you saw layoffs is because we had massive hiring sprees from short term capital through stimulus cheques. These days, when a company tells you they are laying off good workers and replacing them, with software that cannot fact check its output, because their audience cannot tell the difference, you should believe them and consider if that is really what you want the world to become.
RamblingCTO 10mo ago
[flagged]
- rimunroe 10mo ago
  > If your job is cut by AI, you've been producing mediocrity anyway. In my opinion it’s unfortunate and inaccurate to frame this as most likely being a problem with the quality of the work of a person who was let go or who can’t find a job. It’s very possible that management thinks AI is just good enough to justify not hiring someone for the role.
  - RamblingCTO 10mo ago
    Most people are doing bullshit jobs. Are we surprised they are automated away? Taste and general intelligence won't be imho. That's all I'm saying. Take agency over the career you're building. Too many people settle for whatever.
    - rimunroe 10mo ago
      All I was saying is that your framing was callous and also likely terribly inaccurate. It assumes that management always assesses layoffs and technology adoption rationally and objectively based on merits without influence by hype, advertising, or other external forces. People are frequently laid off randomly at large companies. Layoffs at big companies often don't involve someone saying "get rid of these specific 20 copy writers because their copy is worse than what an AI produces". They will ignore performance of individuals completely and instead reduce headcount randomly across a cost center. That doesn't mean that every person who was let go was "producing mediocrity".
- patrick451 10mo ago
  Most of humanity is mediocre. Very few people are excellent. You're response of "touch luck, just be better" to a population with a mean IQ of 100 will lead to pitchforks in the streets.
  - 10mo ago
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
jillesvangurp 10mo ago
I know a few people active as copy/documentation writers. The job is definitely changing and it is harder to find gigs for these people. But large companies still need experienced copy editors in charge of their documentation. They just don't expect that writing it is a manual job anymore. Smaller companies, get away with making this a part time thing that people do on the side. The job has changed. At the same time, the quality and quantity expectations are changing as well. You don't get away with doing the same amount of documentation anymore. AI tools enable more documentation and more comprehensive documentation. So, having that now becomes the norm. But if your job is getting paid per word for text, then yes, that market is a bit smaller now. But it's not all gone and people still get hired to coordinate the documentation writing process or for high quality journalism. But if you were writing filler content for a news paper or low value (it has to be there, but nobody cares) documentation for some software component, then yes, your job is definitely at risk.
- nextworddev 10mo ago
  Yeah. Even docs, instead of having an entire team they might just need a few technical writers
Neil44 10mo ago
My partner is / was a copywriter. She was already a bit fatigued by it even before the whole AI thing. She's still finding bits of work but is pivoting into AI herself now. I think of it like all the other jobs from yesteryear that you hardly ever see. Lamplighter, elevator operator, farrier. People used to form gangs and smash up the mechanical spinning looms.
- happytoexplain 10mo ago
  Usually the implication of this (very common) analogy is that people in the past were somehow behaving wrongly, despite the fact that anybody is right to fight savagely against dramatic disruption to the life they've built, regardless of what the best solution is theoretically. Though even beyond that, the comparison is thin. With AI disruption, the size of the total affected jobs in comparison to the entire economy, as well as the speed of the change, is much more significant.
  - Hizonner 10mo ago
    > anybody is right to fight savagely against dramatic disruption to the life they've built Yeah, I'd built a whole lifestyle around armed robbery, and the cops had the gall to arrest me. It was dramatically disruptive! Seriously, you do not have a "right" to keep doing whatever you've been doing, even if it wasn't destructive. Nobody owes you that. People aren't your serfs.
  - Neil44 10mo ago
    I think they were behaving wrongly yes because the one constant in life is change whatever you do and whatever species you are. Adapt or die surely? The universe isn't a museum.
  - greygoo222 10mo ago
    Understandable? Maybe. Right? Absolutely not.
- voidnap 10mo ago
  It's telling that you compare specialized creative work, like making art, to "jobs" like standing in an elevator. Nobody would miss washroom attendants disappearing either. That is different from automating away the stuff that makes life interesting. Like AI startups telling you that their robot will spend time with your friends and family, so you don't have to. Being disgusted by that is not being a luddite, it's being a well adjusted human with aspirations beyond doomscrolling AI slop on tiktok/youtube.
nextworddev 10mo ago
I know a startup that runs a marketplace and they dropped all their copy writing budget (six figures per year) with just a custom GPT
- loulouxiv 10mo ago
  What do you mean by "a custom GPT" ?
  - nextworddev 10mo ago
    Literally a GpT inside chatgpt
Hizonner 10mo ago
So human-written corporate slop is being replaced by AI-written corporate slop.
- Delphiza 10mo ago
  In my experience, marketers wanted quick and catchy copy to post on linked-in and copywriters obliged. It reached a point where the content was irrelevant. You just had to get something posted on linked-in and get engagement. It was all slop long before AI came along. Nothing useful is posted (to linked-in) because the quality of the posts has been so low for so long that you don't even notice that it is turned into AI slop. All corporate 'news' and 'blog' pages are the same. Copywriters left us a long time ago.
Schlagbohrer 10mo ago
I find myself hoping that my sector is one of the last to be destroyed and that before I personally get laid off, the masses will have fought for and won some kind of UBI or assistance or jobs program or something. Just hope this situation resolves itself before it comes for me. I also had this feeling during the 2020 crash... and during the 2008-2012 crash...
ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46261998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46261998

71 points by thm 10mo ago

Brutal. I think AI led to my being laid off as a software developer, too. It's not quite so clear as the examples here for copywriters, but the company was very interested in using AI to ease the workload, and I can't even say I disagreed with it. I was using it myself. I can't even paint them in a sinister light. They couldn't afford me, and now they had a way to get all the work done with their other developers that were less senior. They were clearly sad to let me go, but they didn't see that they had any choice financially. They weren't a big FAANG company with jillions of dollars. They only had a couple dozen employees. I do wonder how people are going to get to be senior anything in the future, though. It's only going to be people who are really into it that are willing to work that hard to make it happen. The alternative, AI, is just so much easier than it's hard to justify putting that much effort into learning it, unless it's your thing.

btreecat 10mo ago
Was being let go better than renegotiation of your salary?
- oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
  I would say "yes" because a) they don't have to demean themselves by racing to the bottom against an AI b) they no longer have to work for such a scummy company. (Of course, I'm not being 100% serious, and your personal financial situation may be at odds with the tone of this comment)
- wccrawford 10mo ago
  Oh, I tried. They didn't see it working out, and after a couple months to reflect, I agreed with their position on that, too.
happytoexplain 10mo ago
>They couldn't afford me The problem is that in most cases businesses can afford you, but they choose to be "unable to". It's called budgeting, and the ceiling only represents existential limits for small or dying businesses. The rest of the time, it is defined only to maximize profit, which means using their power to shift the negative part of economic changes onto individuals as much as mathematically possible, rather than the business suffering proportionately.
- Schlagbohrer 10mo ago
  Engineers (both HW and SW) are often fantastically bad at understanding how business works, including where their salary comes from and how much value they are producing, versus how small the % of the value they produced is which gets returned to them as their salary. This problem is acute with older hardware and manufacturing engineers who drank all the corporate propaganda they've been fed for decades. I once worked with a senior manufacturing engineer who didn't clock his overtime because he didn't want the huge, multinational corporation we worked for to go bankrupt.
- wccrawford 10mo ago
  I knew enough about their financials that I'm convinced they really couldn't afford somebody, and I was the most expensive. No amount of "budgeting" was going to cover those unexpected circumstances, which they had already tried to work through in other ways. I want to be mad, but I can't.
  - JeanMarcS 10mo ago
    IMHO you can and should. AI is a great assistant. Letting go the more experienced dev is a bad move. We work in a field where you should understand what it is you're doing. We had a wave of "dev" who where told that assembling libraries and API as Lego is the way. It's only a sub part. Now with the AI fuzz, people think it's kind of magic and do everything by its own. It's not. You can gain a lot of time with AI if you know how to prompt and are capable to understand what it spits out. But beting the future of your business on less experimented junior for saving a couple thousand dollars is not a clever move. (Again, my opinion)
sixtyj 10mo ago
Senior. This is the most important. Nobody wants to stop using AI but people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future and people bored by AI. But as there will be an interrupted continuity the next generation will be… Competition is hard so we have to use AI to stay competitive - last time I read similar was… testimonies of concentration camp guards when they were asked why they overlooked atrocities.
- mooreds 10mo ago
  > people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future Can you tell me more? Everything I've read indicates it affects juniors/new devs more. Is that what you mean by a 'senior-free' future? One in which there are no seniors in 10-20 years because there are no juniors now? Or something else?
  - sixtyj 10mo ago
    You have answered your question. If we don’t accept/hire juniors (as companies think they are inefficient) to their first positions then how can they become seniors in their branch? TBH I don’t have a solution for that.

thisisauserid 10mo ago

[flagged]

seu 10mo ago

Can we please stop saying "AI is doing this", "AI is doing that", and instead point out at the companies and individuals that are shoveling AI down our throats as the ones that are decimating industries or destroying jobs, almost exclusively for their own economical benefit? Framing it as "AI" only leads to ignoring the responsibility of those who are making those decisions. It's exactly the same argument behind justifying things as "market forces": it allows everything and makes nobody responsible for it.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
nepture73 10mo ago
This is deliberate from both the left and the right to keep costs down. "AI" is ambient and no one can pin the blame on anyone. In my industry -- software engineering -- AI is being blamed for a job market that tumbled a year before GPT even entered the mainstream. There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. Nevertheless, it is easy to blame AI because it doesnt force us to really examine the causes and thus no policy changes would result. In SWE-land, we done hire people because of three reasons 1. better open source means you dont need to build it on your own 2. More h1/h4/opt visa workers means you can have loyal and under-market pay workers without attrition risk (even Trump with all his power couldnt tackle this lobby) 3. offshore -- us healthcare and benefits are too expensive, easier to just send the work to other countries
- voidnap 10mo ago
  > There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. In 2020 there was a global pandemic called COVID-19 that had a pronounced affect on the world economy. Stimulus cheques were given to companies to keep them afloat through this time. Tech companies spent that new capital on hiring and them layed off a lot of workers when they weren't able to sustain them. A big reason you saw layoffs is because we had massive hiring sprees from short term capital through stimulus cheques. These days, when a company tells you they are laying off good workers and replacing them, with software that cannot fact check its output, because their audience cannot tell the difference, you should believe them and consider if that is really what you want the world to become.

RamblingCTO 10mo ago

[flagged]

rimunroe 10mo ago
> If your job is cut by AI, you've been producing mediocrity anyway. In my opinion it’s unfortunate and inaccurate to frame this as most likely being a problem with the quality of the work of a person who was let go or who can’t find a job. It’s very possible that management thinks AI is just good enough to justify not hiring someone for the role.
- RamblingCTO 10mo ago
  Most people are doing bullshit jobs. Are we surprised they are automated away? Taste and general intelligence won't be imho. That's all I'm saying. Take agency over the career you're building. Too many people settle for whatever.
  - rimunroe 10mo ago
    All I was saying is that your framing was callous and also likely terribly inaccurate. It assumes that management always assesses layoffs and technology adoption rationally and objectively based on merits without influence by hype, advertising, or other external forces. People are frequently laid off randomly at large companies. Layoffs at big companies often don't involve someone saying "get rid of these specific 20 copy writers because their copy is worse than what an AI produces". They will ignore performance of individuals completely and instead reduce headcount randomly across a cost center. That doesn't mean that every person who was let go was "producing mediocrity".
patrick451 10mo ago
Most of humanity is mediocre. Very few people are excellent. You're response of "touch luck, just be better" to a population with a mean IQ of 100 will lead to pitchforks in the streets.
- 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

jillesvangurp 10mo ago

I know a few people active as copy/documentation writers. The job is definitely changing and it is harder to find gigs for these people. But large companies still need experienced copy editors in charge of their documentation. They just don't expect that writing it is a manual job anymore. Smaller companies, get away with making this a part time thing that people do on the side. The job has changed. At the same time, the quality and quantity expectations are changing as well. You don't get away with doing the same amount of documentation anymore. AI tools enable more documentation and more comprehensive documentation. So, having that now becomes the norm. But if your job is getting paid per word for text, then yes, that market is a bit smaller now. But it's not all gone and people still get hired to coordinate the documentation writing process or for high quality journalism. But if you were writing filler content for a news paper or low value (it has to be there, but nobody cares) documentation for some software component, then yes, your job is definitely at risk.

nextworddev 10mo ago
Yeah. Even docs, instead of having an entire team they might just need a few technical writers

Neil44 10mo ago

My partner is / was a copywriter. She was already a bit fatigued by it even before the whole AI thing. She's still finding bits of work but is pivoting into AI herself now. I think of it like all the other jobs from yesteryear that you hardly ever see. Lamplighter, elevator operator, farrier. People used to form gangs and smash up the mechanical spinning looms.

happytoexplain 10mo ago
Usually the implication of this (very common) analogy is that people in the past were somehow behaving wrongly, despite the fact that anybody is right to fight savagely against dramatic disruption to the life they've built, regardless of what the best solution is theoretically. Though even beyond that, the comparison is thin. With AI disruption, the size of the total affected jobs in comparison to the entire economy, as well as the speed of the change, is much more significant.
- Hizonner 10mo ago
  > anybody is right to fight savagely against dramatic disruption to the life they've built Yeah, I'd built a whole lifestyle around armed robbery, and the cops had the gall to arrest me. It was dramatically disruptive! Seriously, you do not have a "right" to keep doing whatever you've been doing, even if it wasn't destructive. Nobody owes you that. People aren't your serfs.
- Neil44 10mo ago
  I think they were behaving wrongly yes because the one constant in life is change whatever you do and whatever species you are. Adapt or die surely? The universe isn't a museum.
- greygoo222 10mo ago
  Understandable? Maybe. Right? Absolutely not.
voidnap 10mo ago
It's telling that you compare specialized creative work, like making art, to "jobs" like standing in an elevator. Nobody would miss washroom attendants disappearing either. That is different from automating away the stuff that makes life interesting. Like AI startups telling you that their robot will spend time with your friends and family, so you don't have to. Being disgusted by that is not being a luddite, it's being a well adjusted human with aspirations beyond doomscrolling AI slop on tiktok/youtube.

nextworddev 10mo ago

I know a startup that runs a marketplace and they dropped all their copy writing budget (six figures per year) with just a custom GPT

loulouxiv 10mo ago
What do you mean by "a custom GPT" ?
- nextworddev 10mo ago
  Literally a GpT inside chatgpt

Hizonner 10mo ago

So human-written corporate slop is being replaced by AI-written corporate slop.

Delphiza 10mo ago
In my experience, marketers wanted quick and catchy copy to post on linked-in and copywriters obliged. It reached a point where the content was irrelevant. You just had to get something posted on linked-in and get engagement. It was all slop long before AI came along. Nothing useful is posted (to linked-in) because the quality of the posts has been so low for so long that you don't even notice that it is turned into AI slop. All corporate 'news' and 'blog' pages are the same. Copywriters left us a long time ago.

Schlagbohrer 10mo ago

I find myself hoping that my sector is one of the last to be destroyed and that before I personally get laid off, the masses will have fought for and won some kind of UBI or assistance or jobs program or something. Just hope this situation resolves itself before it comes for me. I also had this feeling during the 2020 crash... and during the 2008-2012 crash...

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46261998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46261998