As AI job losses rise in the professional sector, many are switching to more traditional trades. But how do they feel about accepting lower pay – and, in some cases, giving up their vocation?
California-based Jacqueline Bowman had been dead set on becoming a writer since she was a child. At 14 she got her first internship at her local newspaper, and later she studied journalism at university. Though she hadn’t been able to make a full-time living from her favourite pastime – fiction writing – post-university, she consistently got writing work (mostly content marketing, some journalism) and went freelance full-time when she was 26. Sure, content marketing wasn’t exactly the dream, but she was writing every day, and it was paying the bills – she was happy enough.
“But something really switched in 2024,” Bowman, now 30, says. Layoffs and publication closures meant that much of her work “kind of dried up. I started to get clients coming to me and talking about AI,” she says – some even brazen enough to tell her how “great” it was “that we don’t need writers any more”. She was offered work as an editor – checking and altering work produced by artificial intelligence. The idea was that polishing up already-written content would take less time than writing it from scratch, so Bowman’s fee was reduced to about half of what it had been when she was writing for the same content marketing agency – but, in reality, it ended up taking double the time.