I'm a full time copywriter for SaaS companies and I'm actually finding the opposite. My experience is people are having AI write stuff then trying to massage it themselves. When they can't get it to a point where they're happy with it they eventually just throw up their hands and hire me for pre-AI project scopes with 2025 rates. Not saying that's the experience everywhere, but AI has been much less problematic for me than most of the narratives I've seen online (knock on wood)
A problem I have with Brian Merchant's reporting on this is that he put out a call for stories from people who have lost their jobs to AI and so that's what he got.
What's missing is a clear indication of the size of this problems. Are there a small number of copywriters who have been affected in this way or is it endemic to the industry as a whole?
I'd love to see larger scale data on this. As far as I can tell (from a quick ChatGPT search session) freelance copywriting jobs are difficult to track because there
isn't a single US labor statistic that covers that category.
> he put out a call for stories from people who have lost their jobs to AI
This seems like an inherently terrible way to look for a story to report. Not only are you unlikely to know if you didn't find work because an AI successfully replaced you, but it's likely to attract the most bitter people in the industry looking for someone to blame.
And, btw, I hate how steeply online content has obviously crashed in quality. It's very obvious that AI has destroyed most of what passed as "reporting" or even just "listicles". But there are better ways to measure this than approaching this from a labor perspective, especially as these jobs likely aren't coming back from private equity slash-and-burning the industry.
Collecting personal stories from people - and doing background reporting to verify those people are credible - is a long standing journalistic tradition. I think it's valuable, and Brian did it very well here (he's a veteran technology reporter).
It doesn't tell the whole story though. That's why I always look for multiple angles and sources on an issue like this (here that's the impact of AI on freelance copywriting.)
> This seems like an inherently terrible way to look for a story to report.
But it’s probably a great way create a story to generate clicks. The people who respond to calls like this one are going to come from the extreme end of the distribution. That makes for a sensational story. But that also makes for a story that doesn't represent the reality as most people will experience it, rather the worst case.
It's such a difficult vertical to track because there isn't always a clear start and end condition. Drafts get passed around, edited, revised, and cleared by different teams, sometimes with a mixture of writing from in-house, freelancers, external agencies, and AI. Lots of people I talk to can't believe the number of projects that get approved and paid for that never end up going live simply because of red tape.
Do you think I mean salaries will go up? That's not what a "buyer's market" means. It means there's more supply, so the buyers (employers) can pay less than in the past.
Assuming you understand what I meant: As for being naive, that's hardly true; my opinion comes from experience. When the bubble burst in the early 2000s, you saw a ton of developers looking for work. This pushed salaries down, even for senior and advanced developers.
I think the idea was that the truly exceptional would only survive- and all the nearly exceptional and less competent would be in other fields. As a result, supply would plummet because no one would hire anybody less than the best.
I think the more appropriate analogy from the 2001 bust is if those fields turn into similar to professional sports where you have to be unimaginably, talented and skilled and disciplined, and everybody else is playing in the rec league fact for nothing
I think this might be what many people think. Which is what brings upon problems of self-worth. However, "best" and "high skill" aren't always the reason why companies value work and workers, i.e. the economy is not a meritocracy.
