50 Workers Affected By AI Share How They Lost Their Jobs And Clients

I was a literary editor for one of the largest sci-fi presses in the world. My boss, the executive editor, retired and the company reassessed their practices. So after spending fifteen years working for the greater good of sci-fi, I got outsourced to a robot.

To be fair, I guess I probably should have seen that coming, given the genre. Just never thought it'd surpass human reading/analysis THAT fast.

hollymbk:

It hasn’t surpassed human reading and analysis. Your company is just soulless and greedy. Another very common sci fi theme, to be fair!

Nobody in this thread lost their job to AI. They lost their job to humans making terrible decisions. It's important to remember that none of this is inevitable.

I used to be a data scientist (with 13 yoe). My boss wanted me to solve a problem which involved clustering sensor data by location. Because errors in latitude and longitude tend to be random, we'll have elliptical clouds of points, so I said we should use k-means. My boss picked up his laptop, turned it around, and said: "But Copilot says that we should use DBSCAN". I researched DBSCAN and found that it would be very slow and do the wrong thing in a worse way. My boss did not agree. I was laid off a few weeks later, along with the rest of the data team. My boss was laid off two months after that. Now the company has an open position for an "AI Scientist" in India.

Confident_Pepper1023:

This bet on "AI" originating from the US-based companies is so weird to me. It seems to be so detrimental, yet most of the leadership seems to be so committed, it feels almost like a cult. As somewhat of a bystander, it feels like China's bet on electrification and exports of technology related to sustainable energy seems so much better, and yet, US folks seem to be doubling down on their initial stance.

Graphic designer here. I haven't been fully replaced yet, but the landscape has completely changed. Clients now expect me to use AI as a 'co-pilot' — generating initial concepts, mood boards, and even rough copy in minutes, not hours. The job is becoming less about executing the first idea and more about curating, refining, and adding the crucial human touch (and catching AI's weird mistakes).

It feels less like I lost my job and more like my job description was rewritten overnight. The pressure to constantly adapt is the real challenge.

addiekinz:

As a fellow graphic designer. Yeah, it's frustrating. My team and I spent a few days working on a branding, getting as far as moodboards and logo concepts. Then our boss AI-generated a (very crappy) moodboard + logo, and presented it to the client then shoved it in our faces like "haha see should've used AI from the start, the client loved it". I was livid, to say the least.

I worked for a newspaper as an editor. I was basically a glorified spell checker. They automated my job for less than $1,000 a year.

Now, I bartend and drive school busses to make ends meet.

lyan-cat:

That sucks. Good editors are worth their weight in gold. Nothing "glorified spell checker" about it. We're losing a skill because the people who make that decision don't understand the value a person adds.

Voice actor here. While I still get the bigger commercials and jobs, I’ve lost a lot of the smaller jobs. For example, storyboarding. Ad agencies will create a digital storyboard detailing what the ad will look like, they hire a voice artist to do a preliminary voice over (you’d earn like 150-200 for the hour), it’s all AI now.

I’ve worked on campaigns where all of the voice artists refused to sign their contact because there’s a new clause in it - if they sign it, they’re signing the rights of their voice over to AI, so this client can use their voice without them ever having to record anything else again. They all refused, the client just recast all of them.

Major-Goose-6320:

What I don't understand is how people can prefer AI VAs over actual artists. Take a look at any video with AI slop voice over and regardless of the content that's what the comments will be about.

lu5ty:

My dad watches the newsreels with ai voiceovers all the time. Tbh i dont think he even knows its ao, and if he does he doesnt care. I imagine there are A LOT of people like this.

I didn’t yet lose my job to ai but I feel I am falling behind as most people are actively using ai in their creative careers which I don’t because you need to buy credits to do anything, I don’t wanna be chained, but yeah it’s hard to match the level or work of people that use AI.

ledow:

Wait until the true cost of AI hits.
OpenAI is hundreds of billions of dollars in the hole and one day their investors are going to want to claw that back, with interest, and profit on top.
They've even said themselves that NOT ONE SINGLE TIER of service is profitable for them. They're just haemorraghing money in order to try to be a loss leader.
When the costs of those tokens/credits start to reflect reality... there are so many companies/people that are going to have a really serious shock once they realise they've lumped all their products / services into relying on it, have been offering it for free to all their customers and sacked the staff who used to do that.

My brother lost his job to AI this month. He worked in QA and his company decided to sack 500 non-client facing jobs to replace them with AI without any warning. I honestly hope that the AI blows up in their face.

War20X:

In QA? The one area you REALLY can't trust a hallucinating AI to do the correct thing, all the time. Paycom is going to hurt for this one. Maybe not today, or tomorrow...but we shall see in the news something weird come out down the road. I know it doesn't matter now because it affects your brother at this moment, sorry to him. The greed of the leadership in the company will just ruin everyone.

Not me, but one of my close friends worked at a call center that was specifically for the hard of hearing/disabled. The people who have the phones that have screens that write out/speak the text. Her job was to basically subtitle each call that came in. She would type out the conversation as it was happening for the disabled person. As you can imagine, they were all laid off and replaced by AI. I’ve heard it’s already caused legal issues and people suing for the AI telling them incorrect info (like from doctors or medical related conversations.).

hisosih:

I'm not surprised at all. I worked in customer service, part of my job was to oversee the chat bot that users would speak to before they got through to an actual agent. The AI would consistently get information incorrect (I dealt with licenses, so there's legal implications if someone is provided with incorrect information from us). Since I was laid off, I've seen an uptick of YouTube videos about how the company is a scam and fallen into other dark patterns (pop ups, autorenewals etc) to extort more money from their elderly users, with no real way for them to get assistance with a refund, so the amount of CC disputes has risen exponentially - and keep in mind the company has to pay for every dispute, whether they win or lose.
I've already seen they're regretting it and are now outsourcing cheaper labour from abroad and taking advantage of foreign workers, but f**k, they torpedoed any good will their brand may have gotten.

Companies tell you it's "AI" but its just an excuse to cut staff.

StumpedTrump:

Excuse to cut staff… and re-hire the positions in India / Africa.
Everyone in the western world in tech has been talking about how “no one’s hiring” the last 2 years. That’s true, my company hasn’t hired anyone local in almost 2 years. We’re hiring like crazy in India though…

Epcoatl:

Kind of funny with so many companies claiming that remote work is bad.

This just happened yesterday so new wounds. They had us train a chat bot so we made the resources to feed it. The chat bot was supposed to help us with the load. Chat bot now gets to carry the whole load. Entire support team got laid off.

arittenberry:

Damn, that sucks for everyone. As a customer, I won't use companies that only have chat bot for support. I'm pretty good at problem solving most issues that come up, so for the instances I need to reach out to support, it's pretty nuanced/complex, which chat bots CAN NOT handle.

My uncle does voice acting. A lot of his work came from audiobooks but that's drying up lately and being replaced by AI voice.

almost_not_terrible:

Advice: become an "AI Voice Director". Seriously. Because you can hear the uncanny valley, you can do the valuable "kerning" job, adding stresses, refining pronunciation etc.
Your experience is valuable, and you can now play a variety of sexes, ages etc.
You are now 100 voice actors, and can charge 120% of your previous rate, but for 100x the number of roles.

I was a proofreader. Well, my company told us that AI can simply do the job faster.

random_thought121:

Proofreading's one of those jobs where AI can do it fast, but not always right. Bet they’ll realize soon enough that human eyes catch way more subtle stuff than any bot ever could.

Not directly me, but I'm a printer that also does graphics.

The amount of Posters and Flyers i've printed that were made with Ai is insane. All of them have mistakes too.

Clients also refuse my spell and print data check way more often to cut costs. Bet some poor folks got fired in those departments.

Luckily I started working in merchandise for musicians. All of our clients care about man made graphics on their shirt and hoodies.

I'm an epidemiologist working for a local health department in a team building disease surveillance capacity. Basically, my team makes data cleaning and visualizations automated so we can spend time interpreting the output and detect outbreaks and patterns earlier. We all have masters or PhDs in epidemiology/biostatistics. We are being pushed out in the middle of respiratory season at the end of the year so the IT team can make oversimplified graphs that are not useful and use AI for the rest.

It's absolutely horrifying that our community's health is in the hands of untrained IT and AI.

j2thebees:

My wife is a nurse working in Hospice/Quality/Training. She just quit a position due to multiple idiotic things. But the lead guy hired “an AI company” that was building an AI tool to do chart audits. They get $25K/month, and only want 10 questions at a time, with the relevant answers.
My son and I are programmers, and anything that can be put into a flow chart can be a program easy enough. Problem is 10 questions won’t get them through the first form (maybe the technicals on one form) and it’s not that unusual for a chart to be well over 100 pages/screens.
Can it be done? Yes. Will the flow chart look like mapping every move of a chess game? 😂 No, but it’s tens of thousands of variables. 🤦‍♂️
Tech companies are so invested in this hype machine, they have to push it off on end users. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s hard to know what to boycott.

Keep in mind, most people will not directly lose their job to AI. Companies will just hire fewer people and expect the current people to get more done.

Like when computers and productivity software got popular, secretaries didn’t lose their jobs. Companies just stopped hiring secretaries.

enricowereld:

All jobs are (indirectly) affected.
I've seen people say "oh well I'm a chef and that will take much longer to automate."
Everyone who's been laid off by AI will want these few remaining jobs now, so your competition is increasing exponentially. The odds of you becoming a chef, or retaining your chef job, will lower drastically, even if the job itself remains manual labor for a while longer.

They just started introducing more Ai things to “save us time so we can focus on the important stuff”, and they swore they weren’t trying to replace people they just wanted to help us at work. Then they eliminated positions one by one. Once they had eliminated 2 jobs and moved the responsibility to my role (so the work of 3 positions) they started laying off those people. Bye.

Ok-Jackfruit-6873:

Exactly what my company is saying now. "Nobody is losing their jobs! This technology is going to allow you to do more with less!" But clearly, they're not planning on backfilling any positions that come open, particularly in comms, and they're going to load up every remaining person with the work of three ... oh and no raises, we're saving up to afford better AI ...

Half my colleagues just got laid off because of AI.

(guess whose workload just doubled).

Darn if I am going through this right now. I am gonna be fully transparent here. To preface, I didn’t lose my job to just AI, but to outsourcing in tandem with AI that our C level execs thought could perform on par with US employees.

I work for a Microsoft vendor that provides global support for Azure cloud and 365. This covers a lot of support verticals, some are technical and some are not so technical.

I am a support engineer for Azure identity and access management. We provide break-fix, RCA, and advisory support on anything from from hybrid environment identity management (AD -> Entra ID), cloud only environments, enterprise provisioning, SCIM, SSO, RBAC, application access, onboarding/offboarding, lifecycle management, key vault, directory management and subscription concepts, etc. We have the broadest scope of Azure technical support.

You, as a SMB or enterprise organization, can pay for Azure support. The support plans vary from broad commercial to Unified (expensive and white glove, think fortune 500 companies). When you make a support request, likely the request goes to a vendor like myself. Sometimes you get a guy who can’t speak english and the support is awful or you get to an American team or sometimes they “escalate” to the better performing teams.

As a vendor, we have a contract with Microsoft to provide this support. There ARE internal Microsoft support engineers, but a smaller team working for typically the customers Microsoft deems the most important.

My team is compromised of American engineers. We consistently have had the highest metrics such as days to close complex issues, lowest rate of technical escalations, and the highest satisfaction ratings from our customers. Compared to teams from other countries, like Nigeria and India, where they take months to resolve issues we’d resolve in days, and have extremely low satisfaction reports. No shade but I have seen the work from these places and it is always playing hot potato and “we are inquiring internally” updates, putting work on other teams, no actual engineering or meaningful work.

My company definitely already underpays us, but the last two years HARD pushed us to use a Microsoft proprietary Copilot version to “assist” with our casework. This AI became a mandatory metric where we could get fired for not using it. This AI was and is almost always wrong with technical information and always wrong on key details when assessing complex issues. Essentially it was completely useless if you have any semblance of competency in your role.

So my company gets the go ahead from Microsoft to start us on the highest tier of paid support (Unified) this year after months of the AI push, which we crush as usual. And then they are renegotiating our contract, stringing us along saying we will make more as we are doing more work and working with more demanding and complex organizations.

Instead, once they get the contract, they lay off every single north American team, to outsource our jobs to an African country that will not be named, to pay these guys 400 usd a MONTH because they are betting they can perform near our level leveraging the AI we trained (it is still useless and actively sabotaging yourself to attempt to rely on it in any form).

Oh, and we didn’t even get severance. We are just expected to work as normal and keep “training” this AI until our last day at the end of the year. Its malding and insanity. My condolences if you pay for Microsoft Azure support (you shouldn’t). Feel free to ask me anything.

Was making 3D models for 20 years, but since AI became a thing, most people just skip the 3D stage altogether and just generate the final image or video instead. AI is still trash at 3D modeling, but it's great at generating the final product, making the models themselves unnecessary.

Working retail now.

lurkjiggler:

Put your skills on Upwork, Fiverr, and other such platforms. You'll be competing with obvious fake profiles but real talent does get work and rewarded freelancing there and clients like me, once we find you, are very jaded by the fakes and latch on to real people when we find them. If nothing more it can be a good side hustle. There is plenty of use for 3d models.