Losing Your Job to ChatGPT

I've seen anecdotal reports of people blaming their job loss on AI tools like ChatGPT. Emily Hanley is a copywriter who apparently lost her job because customers were using ChatGPT instead of hiring a human. She's the subject of this article in BusinessWeek.  

The majority of my freelance assignments came through a single agency working with several brands. When the assignments stopped coming, I emailed my editor/boss to ask if I'd been fired or if all the brands had just voted me off the island, "Survivor" style.

The good news was it wasn't me, but the real reason made me wish it had been.

Clients were simply unwilling to pay for copywriting any longer unless that writer could also provide email management and a funnel-building system, most likely because of the newfound popularity of ChatGPT. Most of my clients were small businesses, startups, and young brands, which are typically the first to adapt to new technology to cut costs — aka me.

I've not heard of this happening to any technical writers, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me, given the rapacious nature of modern business. If you know of any tech writers who lost their jobs to AI, please leave a comment.

If this article is accurate, it will likely be a temporary situation. Researchers have found that the quality of output from Large Language Model systems like ChatGPT has declined over time. It may yet be the end for humans.  

There’s been plenty of speculation online about whether ChatGPT is getting worse over time. Over the last few months, some regular ChatGPT users across sites like Reddit and beyond have openly questioned whether the GPT-4-powered chatbot is getting worse, or if they’re simply getting wiser to the system’s limitations. Some users reported that when asking the bot to restructure a piece of text, the bot would routinely ignore the prompt and write pure fiction. Others noted that the system would fail at relatively simple problem-solving tasks, whether that’s math or coding questions. Some of these complaints may have partially caused ChatGPT engagement to dip for the first time since the app came online last year.