Story Time.

“If AI can replace you you’re not good at what you do.”

👆This is completely false. And I get punchy about it because it hits too close to home.

And orb_muse brings up the VERY IMPORTANT point about writers’ and creators’ professional lives. Good writers (poets) sometimes pay the bills with bad writing (email marketing / SEO-laden blog posts).

Okay… let’s dive in….

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The entire world of marketing, creative design, web design, UX/UI, corporate photography, copywriting, and advertising has already been completely gutted by GenAI.

Yes, AI has outed the incompetent fools who have been hiding in bullshit email jobs.

But it has also enabled many of those same lazy buck-passers.

More importantly though, it has also put tons of hard-working professionals out of work.

Because it never needed to be perfect. It only had to be more efficient.

If it needed to be perfect… well, are you perfect?

Many execs are happy to take AI stuff that is “good enough” when “good enough” costs a few hundred bucks a year and even the cheapest 22-yo college grad in the cheapest part of the country probably costs close to $50,000 + benefits.

I know countless creative teams (the UI/UX designers, the photographers, the graphic designers, the brand folks, the people in charge of coming up with snappy mottos and ad copy and advertisement designs) which have all been ruthlessly cut down from 5-10 people to 1 or 2. And the time-to-new-job is WAY higher than it used to be for these folks.

AI is really bad at so many things and I have doubts it will continue to improve all that much. It’s like a mediocre intern who’s super fast, and basically free.

It’s not top-notch, but at that price? At that speed? It doesn’t need to be.

—-

So, the story.

I went through the exact upheaval in my own career. I feel like I got the last chopper out of ‘Nam.

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In late 2022, I joined a marketing team of 24 people at a huge, global, corporate company.

I left in mid-2024, and by then the team was down to 12 people. This, in spite of also hiring 4 people ‼️ and folding a 3-person team into ours during that same time period (so a total of 31 individuals being in our org at some point).

Still: Fifty percent reduction in net head-count.

In two years.

Even with adding in seven people.

Now, another two years on from when I left? The team no longer exists in any meaningful way. Only 4 of my original 24 team members is still at the company.

None of them are doing the job they were hired for.

Not one.

At every stage it was about adding efficiency. Making positions redundant. Not hiring after firing. “How will we replace this worker? —> Use AI —> But no one else has ever done that specific function before —> give it to the person with the closest experience and have them rely on AI to fill in the gaps.”

So, from mid-2022 to present:

• 11 people got laid off

• 5 people had their roles changed

• 5 people had their roles changed, THEN got laid off.

• 3 people had their roles changed, then quit.

• 7 of us quit on our own terms.

I had an offer in hand when the second (and biggest) layoff happened, and while the company wanted to keep me in a similar role under new leadership, I bounced.

——

That doesn’t mean those 16 people who got laid off were bad at their jobs.

But if you’re an executive and you can cut costs by 95% and cut creation time by 80%, while only sacrificing ~30-40% of “quality” …

it will still be “good enough” to get a functional UI or meet ROAS or get clicks on the ads or maintain a high-ranking website or train the sales teams or have whitebox product imagery or whatever…

That math does itself.

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How do workers survive this?

From my team, the people who didn’t face a prolonged period of unemployment did at least 1 of 3 things:

1. changed careers entirely

2. got really good at AI and are doing their best to keep up (which is a career change, of sorts)

3. had a broad skillset including good soft skills

I did all three, sorta. I did some AI upskilling, but I mostly relied on my soft skills, experience, and wide knowledge base.

Even then, I had two significant career-pivots since 2022.

Few of my colleagues have been so lucky. Some, I would say, did all three of those things and still faced periods out of work. But those that had good people skills, deep networks, wide experience, or good AI skills fared better in the job market.

—-

Especially when you consider that for artist types, the boring sell-out copywriting job and the monotonous whitebox photography and the graphic design gig are the way we make money with our skills… this is a catastrophe and it’s already happening. It’s already been happening for the last four years.

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If you get displaced by AI, it might be because you’re bad at your job.

But it’s probably because you’re too expensive to feed.