Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry

Posted by thm 3 hours ago

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Comment by Neil44 1 hour 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.

Comment by wccrawford 2 hours 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.

Comment by happytoexplain 1 hour 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.

Comment by Schlagbohrer 24 minutes 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.

Comment by sixtyj 35 minutes 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.

Comment by btreecat 2 hours ago

Was being let go better than renegotiation of your salary?

Comment by oneeyedpigeon 1 hour 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)

Comment by Schlagbohrer 21 minutes 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...

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by Hizonner 47 minutes ago

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

Comment by jillesvangurp 1 hour 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.

Comment by nextworddev 52 minutes ago

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

Comment by seu 1 hour 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.

Comment by nepture73 57 minutes 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

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by mexicocitinluez 39 minutes ago

Totally agree.

It also rubs me the wrong way since "AI" quite literally means everything from LLMs to how the ghosts in Pacman move.

Like, you don't hate AI. You hate the way it's being used. It would be weird to say "I hate that computers have the ability to transpose spoken language to text". Or "I can't stand the ambient listening tool being used to treat my father's UTI's while he has Alzheimer's". Or even better "I hate that my credit card company is trying to determine whether someone is fraudulently using it".

And what's worse is that it treats this is a relatively new problem. But rich people abusing the system to make more money at the cost of making others poor is hardly a new thing.

Comment by nextworddev 53 minutes 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

Comment by RamblingCTO 1 hour ago

[flagged]

Comment by rimunroe 1 hour 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 also very possible that management thinks AI is just good enough to justify not hiring someone for the role.

Comment by asplake 1 hour ago

I think that there is still enough demand for quality commenting on HN that if you’re downvoted, you’re producing mediocrity.

Comment by patrick451 1 hour 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.

Comment by kingstnap 15 minutes ago

A shocking number of people are so well below mediocre that its kind of amazing how okayish we get by even pre AI. Makes me thing there is more robustness than you might expect given terrible numbers.

For example what seemed crazy to me that as a country Greece somehow had and still has ~half of their households *primary* source of income being pensions.

Comment by TrackerFF 1 hour ago

Tbh, the unemployed 130+ IQ workers will also join the mob once their are gone.

Comment by Madmallard 1 hour ago

Well thought-out reply

Comment by thisisauserid 1 hour ago

> I’m a writer. I’ll always be a writer when it comes to my off-hours creative pursuits, and I hope to eventually write what I’d like to write full-time.

Riveting stuff. Hard to see how he could be replaced.