Back in May 2025, not long after I put out the first call for AI Killed My Job stories, I received a thoughtful submission from Jacques Reulet II. Jacques shared a story about his job as the head of support operations for a software firm, where, among other things, he wrote copy documenting how to use the company’s product.
“AI didn’t quite kill my current job, but it does mean that most of my job is now training AI to do a job I would have previously trained humans to do,” he told me. “It certainly killed the job I used to have, which I used to climb into my current role.” He was concerned for himself, as well as for his more junior peers. As he told me, “I have no idea how entry-level developers, support agents, or copywriters are supposed to become senior devs, support managers, or marketers when the experience required to ascend is no longer available.”
When we checked back in with Jacques six months later, his company had laid him off. “I was actually let go the week before Thanksgiving now that the AI was good enough,” he wrote.
He elaborated:
Chatbots came in and made it so my job was managing the bots instead of a team of reps. Once the bots were sufficiently trained up to offer “good enough” support, then I was out. I prided myself on being the best. The company was actually awarded a “Best Support” award by G2 (a software review site). We had a reputation for excellence that I’m sure will now blend in with the rest of the pack of chatbots that may or may not have a human reviewing them and making tweaks.
It’s been a similarly rough year for so many other workers, as chronicled by this project and elsewhere—from artists and illustrators seeing client work plummet, to translators losing jobs en masse, to tech workers seeing their roles upended by managers eager to inject AI into every possible process.
And so we end 2025 in AI Killed My Jobs with a look at copywriting, which was among the first jobs singled out by tech firms, the media, and copywriters themselves as particularly vulnerable to job replacement. One of the early replaced-by-AI reports was the sadly memorable story of the copywriter whose senior coworkers started referring to her as “ChatGPT” in work chats before she was laid off without explanation. And YouTube was soon overflowing with influencers and grifters promising viewers thousands of dollars a month with AI copywriting tools.
But there haven’t been many investigations into how all that’s borne out since. 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.
As for Jacques, he’s relocated to Mexico, where the cost of living is cheaper, while he looks for new work. He’s not optimistic. As he put it, “It’s getting dark out there, man.”
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