[…]How have the copywriters been faring, in a world awash in cheap AI text generators and wracked with AI adoption mania in executive circles? As always, we turn to the workers themselves. And once again, the stories they have to tell are unhappy ones. These are accounts of gutted departments, dried up work, lost jobs, and closed businesses. I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work, and others, who, to their chagrin, have been forced to use AI themselves.
Readers of this series will recognize some recurring themes: The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.
Building off this, the last time I remember anyone being a copywriter at a software company I’d worked for was IBM in 2015.
They simply expected the developers to write the documentation. Strangely, this actually worked some of the time, but is usually why modern docs are cobbled together and half-finished, or omitted entirely.
Say what you will about AI being used in this way, but it’s still fuckloads better than the current trend of putting everything on fucking Discord jfc whyyyyy