16 People Who Sadly Lost Their Jobs to AI

In 2024, about 325,000 jobs were cut from companies in the U.S., with a big chunk of them being delegated to AI tools. Even Tesla got rid of 14,000 employees, which was 10% of their entire workforce. So, AI isn’t a distant threat but an active danger that companies decide to trust instead of employing humans. Let’s check these 16 stories and how some people got their lost jobs back after failed AI attempts.

• I curated and wrote a weekly tech newsletter for a well known Android site for two years. Despite my work increasing clicks and subscriptions — and the fact I’m basically responsible for its success — the company is now using AI to automate the newsletter as it’s cheaper. They don’t care that the output will be unprofessional and look terrible. Or that they might report inaccurate news. In the words of my editor: “It costs less money so how it looks/makes us look is unfortunately not so important.” That newsletter writing work was 50% of my income. @geek_girl_81 / Reddit
• A family friend lost her translation job to AI. She translated subtitles for TV and streaming services and now she is out of work. She has her own company is struggling really bad because the only work available for her are really small jobs from smaller clients. @wabudo / Reddit

• I don’t know if I would call it having lost a job, but an artist friend of mine has had a very notable dip in commissions since the launch of AI art. Hard to say if AI is the only thing to blame in this scenario, but the timing lines up. @x***s263 / Reddit
• Guy I went to college with was laid off about a year ago from his developer job. When that went south, the company underwent a shake up in management and the manager who implemented the AI stuff was kicked to the curb and my friend was hired back as some sort of quality/reviewer for the code this thing was spitting out. He was hired back as a “full-time consultant” and is basically making 3x more than he was. He’s been banking a lot of it because he knows this probably won’t last, but figures if his company is looking for people to do this, he can probably find others. @admlshake / Reddit
• I am a freelance proofreader for translation companies. I’ve been doing it full-time for about 18 years. The last year has been an incredibly rough ride since AI has completely shaken up the translation industry and my clients don’t have the same volume of work to send me that they used to. The last few months have been better but the overall trend is still terrible. I want out but after 18 years as a freelancer I may as well be an alien in this current job market. @double_eyelid / Reddit
  

• Friend of mine did document review for the Department of Veteran affairs. The contracting company laid off a huge amount of their staff in favor of AI. I think the job losses were in the hundreds. @Contemplationz / Reddit
• Less than a year ago, the company I work for laid off an entire team of sales reps because “AI could do it.” Now they are rebuilding that team. @Shirkaday / Reddit
• I used to be the person that trained and deployed AI for visual inspection of goods. We’d put cameras at the end of production processes that take photos of the products. Then we’d have the regular QA checking people mark out which products were faulty and which were not. We would then use the photos and the faulty-or-not information to train an AI to run visual inspection instead. This usually caused the QA staff to be shrunk by quite a bit, because they only needed people to do random samples and manually inspect the products that were either faulty or had a too low confidence interval. The most evil thing about it was that they basically trained their own replacement. @Ethernum / Reddit

• My wife used to create teaching videos for an imaging machine. Her entire department (12 FT employees) was fired in favor of a HS graduate ’prompt engineer’. @Monarc73 / Reddit
• My name is Alex and I’ve been storyboarding for 20 years and when I speak to art directors and producers they’re using AI to get the storyboards done instead of hiring me and people like me. I’m married with 2 kids and I worry about our future. @antoniou_1 / Reddit
• I lost my job to an AI chatbot. I worked at a coding boot camp helping students work through issues passing tests or understanding concepts and they fired me and almost the entire team to use a ChatGPT bot. @Opris_music / Reddit

• A few months ago I met a guy at the car shop. We were chatting and he said him and his whole writing team at MSN were laid off and replaced by AI. He loved writing for MSN for over 10 years. MSN gets over 600 million views a month, but now, its all AI, even the “writers” are AI. Like Spotify making AI music, then assigning an “artist” to it, and your tip goes to the “artist” which is Spotify. @ArtichokeEmergency18 / Reddit
• I know a guy who doesn’t get as many voice gigs anymore. He can do all sorts of impressions. Used to do voices for commercials and be an announcer for smaller sport leagues and events. Way less of the former now. @Kujaix / Reddit
• A close friend was a programming team manager. This spring she was called into a VPs office and told, “we’re moving in a new direction with AI” and let go her and her entire team. @_Barbaric_yawp / Reddit
  

Are you an AI enthusiast or are you afraid of what it’s going to cost humans? Take a look at Switzerland’s experiment when they left and AI bot to take over the radio for 13 hours.