Tech journalist Brian Merchant has been collecting stories from workers whose jobs have been affected by AI tools. His latest installment focuses on copywriters, and the accounts paint a picture that's grimmer than most industry discussions acknowledge: closed businesses, forced career changes, and in one case, a pivot to online sex work to pay bills.
The speed of decline
The numbers from individual contributors tell a consistent story. One agency owner, Marcus Wiesner, described going from $600,000 in annual revenue with eight employees to under $10,000 in 2025. That's not a gradual decline.
"We had a staff of 8 people... This year we made less than $10k," he told Merchant's newsletter Blood in the Machine. The timeline matters here: 2022 to 2023 saw a noticeable drop. 2023 to 2024 was, in his words, "catastrophic."
Wiesner's business served startups and small businesses through Fiverr, the kind of clients who'd previously needed professional help with website copy and landing pages. When ChatGPT arrived, those same clients decided the output was "good enough." His expertise in conversion rate optimization, his years building a client base, his understanding of how to find a business's voice and market position, none of it mattered against the zero-dollar overhead argument.
What "replacement" actually looks like
The investigation reveals something more nuanced than simple replacement. Few copywriters describe waking up to find their job eliminated by a robot. Instead, the process resembles slow suffocation.
A social media copywriter for small businesses noticed her queue getting lighter month by month. Clients she'd worked with for years stopped appearing. When she asked what was happening, she got shrugged off. Then suddenly, nothing. No warning, no severance conversation.
The company transitioned to a model where clients could "write" the content themselves using Mad Libs-style templates that would generate copy through AI, with a skeleton crew of in-house employees managing the process.
She eventually discovered the freelancers had all been let go without notification. The company hadn't even bothered telling them.
Another contributor, Jacques Reulet II, initially reached out to Merchant in May 2025 to describe an uncomfortable situation: his job had become training AI to do what he used to train humans to do. Six months later, he was laid off entirely. "I was actually let go the week before Thanksgiving now that the AI was good enough," he wrote.
The quality question nobody's asking
Several contributors made the same observation: the AI output isn't better. It's just cheaper.
That social media copywriter again: "They didn't care that the quality of the posts would go down. They didn't care that AI can't actually get to know the client or their needs."
A consulting marketing director cried when telling one contributor she was being replaced. The CEO and his associate wanted to use a custom GPT they'd built. "They surely trained it using my work," the contributor noted dryly.
This pattern, of companies using human-created work to train systems that then replace those humans, appears throughout the accounts. A Gracenote editor described learning that two years of prioritization decisions had been fed into machine learning to build a tool that would let cheaper overseas labor do the job instead.
What happens next
The contributors aren't uniformly pessimistic. A few see a potential future where businesses realize that AI-generated content is creating a sea of homogenous slop, and that human writers will become premium options. One compared the potential future to tailors and seamstresses, serving a "very, very niche market for only the highest-end clients."
But that's cold comfort for people trying to pay rent now.
One writer is now doing brand ambassador work (handing out sparkling water samples at grocery stores). Another relocated to Mexico where living costs are lower. A nonprofit communications worker spends three to four hours daily playing solitaire on his phone because his workload has been gutted but he hasn't been formally let go yet. His colleagues have told him to his face that AI should probably be doing his job.
The copywriter who turned to sex work asked to remain anonymous. "There's no shame in doing it, because many people genuinely enjoy doing it and are empowered by it, but for me it's not the case," she wrote. "It's just the only thing I've been able to get that pays the bills."
The ghostwriter's story
One account stood out for its complexity. Brian Penny spent over a decade ghostwriting for publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and dozens of others, working through an agency called Influence & Co. (later Intero Digital). The work involved interviewing executives, combining their insights with research and statistics, and crafting pieces that would pass the stringent submission guidelines of major publications.
The system worked because humans could do something AI couldn't: conduct meaningful interviews, extract genuine insights, and understand what would resonate with each publication's audience.
Then ChatGPT entered the workflow. Not through the agency. Through the clients themselves.
"The client interview I mentioned above as being vital because it gets info you can't get online and their voice and everything you need to do it right, well those clients started using ChatGPT," Penny explained. By the end of 2023, he couldn't take it anymore. The work had fundamentally changed from something intellectually engaging to cleaning up AI output.
His income from writing dropped from $40,000-$50,000 annually to $12,000. He now makes $30,000 a year selling Midjourney-generated images on Adobe Stock, a turn of events he finds almost absurd.
The data that exists
Tracking AI-specific job losses is difficult because companies rarely cite it directly. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas began tracking AI as a layoff reason in May 2023, when nearly 4,000 job cuts were attributed to AI, all in the tech sector. That was the first time the firm had included AI as a category.
More recent data from the same firm shows AI has been cited for over 71,000 job cut announcements since 2023. But these figures almost certainly undercount the reality. Many companies don't cite AI explicitly. Freelancers who lose clients don't show up in layoff statistics at all.
A 2024 survey of 422 copywriters by ProCopywriters found that 46% weren't losing sleep over AI, though the survey also acknowledged that "the latest wave of AI tools has reduced the opportunities available to writers, with some people already retraining in professions that can't be threatened by AI."
The degradation pattern
Merchant's series has covered tech workers, translators, and artists in addition to copywriters. A pattern emerges across all groups: AI doesn't eliminate jobs so much as it degrades them.
The copywriters describe being asked to edit AI output rather than write from scratch, at reduced rates. Translators face "MTPE" (machine translation post-editing) work that pays a fraction of translation rates. Tech workers find themselves reviewing AI-generated code of questionable quality.
As one contributor put it: "I don't want to be a skilled operator. I want to be a human copywriter. Yet, I think these days are numbered."
The newsletter is part of Merchant's broader project examining AI's labor impacts. Merchant, author of the 2023 book Blood in the Machine about the Luddite rebellion, is a journalist-in-residence at the AI Now Institute. Upcoming installments will focus on education, healthcare, and journalism.
