The growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has raised worries about job loss and AI taking over. In reality, many people have already lost their jobs to AI.
A user asked the forum, “Those who had their jobs replaced by AI, what was the job? What replaced it? What do you do now?”. Here are the common responses.
VIDEO EDITOR
“I used to be a video editor for various small YouTubers. My job was to turn videos into shorts & add those captions with emojis. What replaced it? Tools like Vsub.io with speech detection & auto-captioning.
What should I do now? I’m still in video editing but shifting my focus toward longer video content. I had to quit freelancing and find a job. That’s just how life goes.
CONTENT EDITOR
“My entire editing team was replaced by a robot that was supposed to write and edit text like a human can. They didn’t test the robot first; it was terrible, and their entire project failed. No tears were shed.”
INVENTORY JOB AT AMAZON
“Worked at Amazon for a few years. I did inventory all night. Then, they installed cameras, scanners, AI, etc. We still need a human, but many are no longer needed. SBC (Simple Bin Count, count everything in the bin, easy) is redundant.”
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER
“I was on a small software development team at a large company. We were often tasked with working on our project and utilizing new cutting-edge technologies to test whether they would be viable before rolling them out to the rest of the development team.
We were asked to leverage AI to help us develop, and we praised it highly. We talked it up too much, though, and they decided to see if they could bypass needing software developers and have the business analysts generate code from their requirements and then send that code straight to Quality Assurance (QA).
They didn’t test if that would work before laying off our entire development team, and a couple of months later, they laid off the remaining team members because it wasn’t working out. It was just one of many bad decisions they made around that time, and they’re currently struggling and losing market share because of it.
I’m still working as a software engineer and use AI as a useful tool, but I’m always sure to let my supervisors and managers know its pitfalls and how it’s just supplementing my work and not wholly doing my job for me.”
FORKLIFT OPERATOR
“Not me, but some warehouses have some self-driving high-reach forklifts; someone said their warehouse has only two human high-reach drivers & 9 self-driving high-reaches. Crazy stuff.”
PROJECTIONIST
“I used to be a projectionist. Now, a movie is on a hard drive and programmed to run remotely.”
SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURER
“I am about to lose my job to a layoff, but I will be replaced by 2025. Most production is fully automated in semiconductor manufacturing, with plans to automate more. My job is basically to babysit idle machines right now.
The maintenance crew will always be necessary, but I am not required as soon as AI can do the rest of my job. I can be replaced by code; the company would love to get all the products made without paying people for their time.
I know I am expendable to them, but it’s the best paycheck in the county. Sad, but it’s the truth. I will stick it out while I apply for new jobs.
COPYWRITER
“My wife was a copywriter/ wrote blogs for internet optimization online, primarily for legal and medical fields. AI took over, and her company either fired everyone or severely reduced the pay offered per job. She is still unemployed, and just last week, we received news that the company is now going out of business.”
CONTENT WRITER
“I recently lost a content writing job for a small Italian company (10 people). I would spend much time fixing poor English translations, making the content fit for press releases, and writing articles.
They usually would message me when they needed something fixed or made, but the messages slowed to the point that we cut ties.
This is the silent death of the gig economy. You won’t hear about people like me losing their side hustles.”
MEDICAL AUDIO TYPISTS
“I was a medical audio typist for about ten years. A new speech-to-text software was widely used, and about 180 out of 240 of my colleagues were laid off. I have now been unemployed for around 2.5 years.”
DATA TRANSCRIPTOR
“I worked for a healthcare company with an entire team that transcribed data from an old, proprietary image archive format into a new modern system. My manager asked me to automate it.
I poked around the archive format long enough to understand how it worked. I extracted the images, cobbled some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) together, and sent the result into our modern system. The transcription team was laid off instead of retrained to do something else, and I felt like garbage.”
TRANSLATOR
“Translator. I used to translate and proofread academic material from Chinese to English and vice-versa. Human translation still exists, and there is a need for it. Still, cheaper companies or those looking to cut costs have started shifting work entirely into ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) or a combination of DeepL and GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer).
I embrace AI, of course, and both GPT and DeepL are precious tools for use in translation. It’s just a bit of a shame that certain companies don’t realize or forget the need for a human touch in editing, checking, and proofreading, e.g., you can prompt GPT to give you as close to a specific version as possible, but I haven’t seen a perfect iteration of a prompt just yet.
I still do freelance translation for larger projects or projects that AI can’t yet get right, e.g., translation of religious text that needs to follow strict parameters. Still, it has been a challenging year for translation in general. Companies naturally frothed at the mouth at the idea of cutting an entire department to save costs, which has been happening especially across the education industry.”
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
“I’m a graphic designer, so I see it coming down the track towards me. Fortunately, I have a job with union protection, so even if they didn’t need me for graphic design, they couldn’t just fire me. They would have to reassign me to other work.
Also, I am considering a management track to expand my marketable skills, even though the pay bump isn’t worth the extra work.”
DATA ANNOTATOR
“Data annotator. In high school, I worked as a data annotator for AI training; the pay was peanuts but was enough for pocket money. Then all major companies came out with their own data-cleaning AIs, which immediately sealed the door for me, and the subsequent IT collapse didn’t help.”
COPY EDITOR
“Not me, but my sister was a copy editor. Now she’s jobless.”
ADVERTISING STORYBOARD ARTIST
“Advertising storyboard artist here. My job is to listen to creative directors and create a visual representation of their ideas that they can show to the money people. Now, those directors are just typing their instructions into a prompt.
My art agency has been seriously affected. There is still some work out there as the tide is turning slightly against AI, but it’s still wrong.
People saying I need to learn to use AI and incorporate it into my tools are out of their minds. It’s not an extra tool; it deletes the need for the artist and places creative control in non-creative hands.”
WELDER
“I’m halfway through being replaced by AI. I’m a welder, and we use robots for tedious welds, but setup and other things humans must do for now. I’ve seen some examples of tech learning from welders to do tasks humans need to do now. I assume in the future, all welders will do is fix the robots or train robots.”
More From Mrs Daaku Studio
13 Things Are Scientifically Proven, But People Still Don’t Believe Them. Do You Believe Them? Read about it here.
15 Red Flags That Someone Is Stupid. Are You?
Certain traits can give us clues about a person’s intelligence. For example, people who are curious and eager to learn new things are often more intelligent than those who are content with the status quo. People who are good at solving problems and thinking critically are also typically more intelligent. Read the signs of stupidity.
21 Things You’re Saying That Make People Dislike You Instantly. Guilty of Any?
There are many things that you can say or do that makes someone dislike you. Read – 21 Things You’re Saying That Make People Dislike You Instantly. Guilty of Any?
17 Curse-Free Words That Will Still Get Your Point Across. Do You Use Any?
Want to curse someone but not use the harsh words? Read 17 Curse-Free Words That Will Still Get Your Point Across. Do You Use Any?
20 Jobs That You Should Never Do, No Matter How Much They Pay. They’re Evil.
Not all jobs are great, check this out. 20 Jobs That You Should Never Do, No Matter How Much They Pay. They’re Evil.
This article was originally published on Mrs Daaku Studio.