AI Came For My Job

You're terminated! Welp! That was quicker than I had anticipated.

Yesterday, I was informed that my job as a freelance editor was no more. I, along with all of the other freelance editors as well as the freelance writers, had been let go due to a sustained and ongoing work shortage at our company, We Do Web Content. I can honestly say I was not even slightly surprised. I knew AI was going to come for my job and now it has. I’m not even going to bother looking for another job in this field.

Let me give you a bit of background and you’ll understand why.

Back in 2018-2019, I was looking for a second job. Well, a third job, actually. 6 years ago, Jordan was 10 and Anastasia was 8 so I was somewhere between part-time and full-time stay-at-home parent. They were kind of independent but still needed lots of attention from Daddy. Not so much now that they’re teens.¹

Despite this, while they were at school in 2018, I had enough free time to work from home. I was writing for The Daily Banter and had a nascent political website of my own that employed several writers. Things were going pretty well and our traffic was growing.

But after Facebook murdered traffic to news sites (unless you pay huge amounts of money to boost your content²), I shut down my site and Ben Cohen dropped the “daily” part to become “The Banter.” That meant I went from writing several shorter articles a week to writing one long-form piece instead. My pay, obviously, dropped substantially. So, I went looking for something else to do in addition to writing at The Banter.

This is when I discovered content companies. These are the companies that produce articles for clients who do not have the time or skills to write content for their websites. I tried writing a few articles but discovered that I hated it with a passion. I love to write but it has to be about something I give a shit about. I do not give a shit about the top 10 washing machines of 2018.

My friend Shannon suggested I try editing instead. I had spent time editing while working at a different site but only as an afterthought. It wasn’t my main job, just something I did to help out writers who were just getting started and needed some pointers on how to improve the work they produced. Editing as a proper job, I discovered, was something I was good at and enjoyed immensely.

It didn’t matter what the topic was, I had fun cleaning up articles and making them better. It didn’t hurt that the company I worked for covered an astonishingly wide variety of topics so I learned a lot of interesting random stuff. And I was paid incredibly well.

That lasted for about 15 months until the owners of the company were arrested. Turns out that the other side of the company, not the content side we all worked in, was a massive $100 million Ponzi scheme. Whoops. Needless to say, the company closed and we were all let go.

A few months later, in early March 2020, I landed a job at a different content company. If March 2020 is ringing a faint bell for you, that would be when Covid swept the US and everything shut down. Suddenly, the kids were no longer in school and Debbie was working from home.

I politely explained to the nice CEO lady who had hired me that I would not be able to take the job she had just hired me for. I was going to be a full-time parent again and maybe I could try again in a few months when all this Covid stuff was over?

The longest two years of all of our lives.

After the kids were back in school for a few months and it was clear they were going to stay in school, I sent an email to the nice CEO lady in February of 2022, almost 2 full years after she originally offered me a job.

Apparently, I had left an impression because not only did she remember me, but she hired me so quickly that she forgot to tell me how much I would be getting paid. Or that she had hired me. I just got an email from someone telling me that I was starting the next day. That was an awkward conversation.

Still, I got the job and I was working again. A year later, the internet exploded with Chat GPT and a million articles about how it was going to take everyone’s jobs. I called it the “AI Apocalypse” and assumed I had a few years left before my job was nuked.

Turns out that was extremely optimistic.

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Here’s the thing about my job that I figured would shield me a little bit longer: It’s almost entirely lawyer stuff. And we’ve discovered that AI is really bad at lawyer stuff. Painfully so.

The AI legal software market could grow from $1.3 billion in 2022 to upward of $8.7 billion by 2030, according to an industry analysis by the market research firm Global Industry Analysts. A report by Goldman Sachs in April estimated that 44 percent of legal jobs could be automated away, more than any other sector except for administrative work.

But these money-saving tools can come at a cost. Some AI chatbots are prone to fabricating facts, causing lawyers to be fired or fined, or to have cases thrown out. Legal professionals are racing to create guidelines for the technology’s use, to prevent inaccuracies from bungling major cases.

Yeah…you definitely don’t want an AI just making shit up in an article for the website representing your law firm. Aside from how unbelievably unprofessional you’ll look, it opens you to all kinds of fun litigation. We had to take the utmost care as editors to weed out mistakes and inaccuracies for that very reason.

Regardless, I knew it would just be a matter of time until AI came for my job. It costs money to have quality articles written. I’ve seen what junk looks like and, wow, you don’t want to go there.

But chatbots made enormous progress in a very short amount of time and if a firm could save several thousand dollars? That was going to happen sooner or later.

There’s usually a slowdown around the holidays and as a part-time freelance editor, I would see little to no work for a month or so. But the slowdown started early last year, before Thanksgiving. That got my spidey sense tingling. A month later, I hadn’t heard anything so I decided that maybe it was time to start that newsletter I’d been thinking of. The Opinionated Ogre? You might have heard of it.

Christmas came and went. New Year’s Eve. A few more weeks. A whole lot of quiet. And then the email arrived yesterday that the slowdown was, in fact, permanent and all of the freelance writers and editors were being let go. So long and thanks for all the fish.

WDWC is not a new company. They’ve been around for several years and they are now struggling. That means the content creation industry as we know it is going to die soon, killed by AI. Who needs content writers and editors when increasingly sophisticated chatbots can do the work almost for free? There will be a dip in quality for a while but that will eventually change as the AIs get better. Not much point in scrambling for another editing gig only to see that one wiped out in 6 months.

So, that sucked. I mean, I knew it was coming but still. The upside is now I can focus on this newsletter and building an audience. I love to write so there’s that. The downside is that it’s going to take a while to build up a real base of subscribers. Assuming I can. Please feel free to recommend this newsletter and help me out. :)

At least I won’t have to worry about being replaced by 01100001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01110101 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100111 01110010 01100001 01101101 00100000 01100001 01101110 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101111 01101110 00101110

1. My babies are growing up! Waaaaaaaah!!!!

2. What? Did you think right-wing news dominates Facebook because it’s so popular? No. They have unlimited funding so they can pay to go “viral.”