Imagine Losing Your Job to AI

In Which Is Plainly, Though at Some Length and with Much Personal Affliction, Related the Melancholy Truth That the Spectre Men Name Artificial Intelligence Hath Not Only Set Itself to the Taking of Honest Employment, but Hath in Many Cases Already Effected the Same; the Whole Being Most Bitterly Illustrated by a Figure Wrought Through the Agency of That Very Unnatural Power.

The Atlantic published a piece recently titled: Imagine Losing Your Job to the Mere Possibility of AI - The Atlantic

Quite the provocative title. 

I'm sharing this article, maybe as a launchpad to share my own experience. The article itself is a little less than okay. The author spends more time engaging with their own conjecture than with the reality of existing job-loss data, and leans into the fun narrative that Wall Street is encouraging these layoffs by showing confidence in companies that initiate them.

But here's the deal: people are losing their jobs, not to the possibility of AI, but to the usage of AI. And the ones behind this aren't necessarily ones listed on the exchange.

I know because I lost my job to AI. 

For several years, I worked in content marketing. Which is to say, we were an SEO forward company. The better we ranked in Google, the more money we made. And our company did well. Our top competitors were ones you've no doubt heard of: Forbes Advisor, NerdWallet, and Business.com. 

The advent of generative AI (ChatGPT is the best known) upended the industry. It upended it not by taking our jobs, not initially, but by Google's response. So many people flocked to using gen AI for their search instead of Google that Google reacted by reworking its search ranking algorithm. This caused thousands of websites to see their traffic plummet. They did this multiple times and then introduced AI Overview, and well, the rest is history. 

I watched with fear as our big competitors gutted their editorial department to save money because they weren't making any money. Then I watched with sadness as small mom-and-pop websites saw their traffic plummet and their revenue from affiliate links dry up. I'm talking about those websites you've encountered, likely, where a mom of four starts a glorified blog with recipes paired with tips on parenting. Things like that. 

Where did these websites go, and what replaced them? Well, they were buried. Just being on the second or third page of rankings can mean thousands of dollars in revenue lost every month. And they were replaced by... junk. I'm not being hyperbolic or vitriolic—I spent hours and hours analyzing the sites that bumped us out of the #1 ranks. The author bios were empty or completely nonsensical-- one had a picture of a painting of Napoleon with nonsense for their information. The content was clearly written by AI. It was poorly written. The advice was bad. But it outranked us because Google decided AI was it. 

Eventually, over 60% of our department was eliminated. The rest were retained as the company shifted its focus to AI-written content overseen by a few select humans. 

The article references a warning that it will be coming for white-collar jobs, and most of them will be eliminated. I think that is true. Emphatic AIs like Hume will eliminate many therapist and counselor roles. I currently work in the healthcare field and have calls with healthcare companies. One recently was excited about their new AI Chatbot, trained by psychiatrists, offered for FREE 24/7 to people dealing with anxiety, depression, and other similar issues. 

This is one example of many.  

But it is a farce to think AI isn't replacing jobs—I know it is. Most of my colleagues in content marketing are still unemployed because why hire someone to write when AI can do a kind of good job for significantly less?  I know people who lost work who were in graphic arts and design. Same reasoning. And while I'm sure market investors may play a part, what is ultimately driving it is the bottom line of the company. A minor distinction, but a real one. If they can save money by halving the workforce and using AI—even if the quality drops—they will. 

Trust me. So yes, Yang is right. The Fuckening is happening. Get ready.