People Reveal How They Lost Their Jobs To Artificial Intelligence

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) dates back thousands of years with ancient myths. Later, inventors would create automatons that moved independently through the use of gears, cogs, and springs.

But for a long time, the idea of an artificial brain was relegated to science fiction.

Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is credited with creating the AI field in the 1950s. In the 1970s and 80s, computers became faster, easier to use, and more affordable leading to the first generation, millennials, growing up with computers.

This familiarity lead to faster advancements in the field of AI. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov giving the public their first taste of a computer generating independent "thought."

By the 2020s, AI exploded to become part of daily life, much the way home computers, the internet, smartphones, and social media had previously. But at what cost?

Reddit user _thecatspajamas_ asked:

"Hey people who lost their jobs to AI, what happened?"

Tech Support

"I am going through this right now. I am gonna be fully transparent here. To preface, I didn’t lose my job to just AI, but to outsourcing in tandem with AI that our C level execs thought could perform on par with US employees."

"I work for a Microsoft vendor that provides global support for Azure cloud and 365. This covers a lot of support verticals, some are technical and some are not so technical."

"I am a support engineer for Azure identity and access management. We provide break-fix, RCA, and advisory support on anything from from hybrid environment identity management (AD -> Entra ID), cloud only environments, enterprise provisioning, SCIM, SSO, RBAC, application access, onboarding/offboarding, lifecycle management, key vault, directory management and subscription concepts, etc. We have the broadest scope of Azure technical support."

"You, as a SMB or enterprise organization, can pay for Azure support. The support plans vary from broad commercial to Unified (expensive and white glove, think fortune 500 companies). When you make a support request, likely the request goes to a vendor like myself."

"Sometimes you get a guy who can’t speak English and the support is awful or you get to an American team or sometimes they 'escalate' to the better performing teams."

"As a vendor, we have a contract with Microsoft to provide this support. There ARE internal Microsoft support engineers, but a smaller team working for typically the customers Microsoft deems the most important."

"My team is compromised of American engineers. We consistently have had the highest metrics such as days to close complex issues, lowest rate of technical escalations, and the highest satisfaction ratings from our customers."

"Compared to teams from other countries, like Nigeria and India, where they take months to resolve issues we’d resolve in days, and have extremely low satisfaction reports. No shade, but I have seen the work from these places and it is always playing hot potato and 'we are inquiring internally' updates, putting work on other teams, no actual engineering or meaningful work."

"My company definitely already underpays us, but the last two years HARD pushed us to use a Microsoft proprietary Copilot version to 'assist' with our casework. This AI became a mandatory metric where we could get fired for not using it."

"This AI was and is almost always wrong with technical information and always wrong on key details when assessing complex issues. Essentially it was completely useless if you have any semblance of competency in your role."

"So my company gets the go ahead from Microsoft to start us on the highest tier of paid support (Unified) this year after months of the AI push, which we crush as usual. And then they are renegotiating our contract, stringing us along saying we will make more as we are doing more work and working with more demanding and complex organizations."

"Instead, once they get the contract, they lay off every single north American team, to outsource our jobs to an African country that will not be named, to pay these guys 400 USD a MONTH because they are betting they can perform near our level leveraging the AI we trained (it is still useless and actively sabotaging yourself to attempt to rely on it in any form)."

"Oh, and we didn’t even get severance. We are just expected to work as normal and keep 'training' this AI until our last day at the end of the year. It's insanity. My condolences if you pay for Microsoft Azure support (you shouldn’t)."

~ _Sweet_JP

Government Paperwork

"I wasn’t replaced by AI in a 1:1 capacity, but it did destroy my field in general. It’s a weird case. AI replaced the job, but then the job replaced AI. But because the job’s ecosystem was so fragile, grifters accidentally eliminated maybe 80% of the opportunities in the field."

"I had 10 years of experience doing an extremely niche type of Government paperwork. Without going into detail, this was the sort of paperwork that businesses (especially small businesses) absolutely HAD to do, for a few logistical reasons."

"Extremely tedious, extremely long (250-500 pages about 20 times a year). I mostly worked for Small Businesses, who themselves would work for various Government branches."

"Around late 2023/early 2024, the typical AI grifters started selling their products to businesses in this area. The idea was 'Hey, you have a staff of managers, editors, and writers, our LLM can replace all that!'."

"So the small businesses, which were in truth VERY small (<30 people, usually), ate this up. They were already fly-by-night skeleton operations (by design), and any cost saving measure was welcome. So, the small businesses laid a bunch of us specialists off, myself included."

"Here’s where it gets weird. The type of paperwork we do is extremely complex, very time sensitive, and is often reviewed at a very detailed level. So the AI actually couldn’t replace the people, without a lot more time and money invested in editing and correcting it."

"Problem is, this sort of paperwork was absolutely ESSENTIAL in keep in the business’s doors open. So many of the small businesses, most of whom would live contract-to-contract, suddenly lost the ability to do this paperwork."

"Which meant they lost the ability to get new contracts. Which meant they mostly just went out of business."

"This all happened at roughly the same time as DOGE and an overall downtick in government spending. So my field was (briefly) replaced, but now people want to hire again because the AI couldn’t do the job."

"But 80% of the companies that would be hiring these jobs back….. simply don’t exist anymore, because they went out of business."

~ cslevens

Customer Service

"I worked in customer service, part of my job was to oversee the chat bot that users would speak to before they got through to an actual agent. The AI would consistently get information incorrect (I dealt with licenses, so there's legal implications if someone is provided with incorrect information from us)."

"Since I was laid off, I've seen an uptick of YouTube videos about how the company is a scam and fallen into other dark patterns (pop ups, autorenewals etc) to extort more money from their elderly users, with no real way for them to get assistance with a refund, so the amount of credit card disputes has risen exponentially—and keep in mind the company has to pay for every dispute, whether they win or lose."

"I've already seen they're regretting it and are now outsourcing cheaper labour from abroad and taking advantage of foreign workers, but f*ck, they torpedoed any good will their brand may have gotten."

~ hisosih

Newspaper Editor

"I worked for a newspaper as an editor. I did a lot more than edit, but the powers above me didn't seem to care."

"I was basically a glorified spell checker to them. They automated my job for less than $1,000 a year."

"Now, I bartend and drive school buses to make ends meet."

~ thinkdeep

Training The Replacement

"We went from positioning AI as our ‘assistant for the monotone tasks’ with humans in the driver's seat. One year later, and we’re positioning our AI solutions as core products built on the business’s IP."

"We are all suckers for having trained the goddamn thing to grab our knowledge and experience and run with it. The CEO who climbed his way to the top is also replaced by some dude with zero background in our field but experienced in AI tech and restructuring."

"We are screwed."

~ dna_noodle

3D Modeling

"Was making 3D models for 20 years, but since AI became a thing, most people just skip the 3D stage altogether and just generate the final image or video instead."

"AI is still trash at 3D modeling, but it's great at generating the final product, making the models themselves unnecessary."

"Working retail now."

~ rmpumper

Literary Editor

"I was a literary editor for one of the largest sci-fi presses in the world. My boss, the executive editor, retired, and the company reassessed its practices."

"So after spending fifteen years working for the greater good of sci-fi, I got outsourced to a robot."

"To be fair, I guess I probably should have seen that coming, given the genre. Just never thought it'd surpass human reading/analysis THAT fast."

~ Apocalypse_Wow

Call Center Transcriber

"Not me, but one of my close friends worked at a call center that was specifically for the hard-of-hearing/disabled. The people who have the phones that have screens that write out/speak the text."

"Her job was to basically subtitle each call that came in. She would type out the conversation as it was happening for the disabled person. As you can imagine, they were all laid off and replaced by AI."

"I’ve heard it’s already caused legal issues and people suing for the AI telling them incorrect info (like from doctors or medical related conversations)."

~ ScarletSpell

"I worked for that company, I was there for nearly a decade. It was interesting to watch the downfall."

"When I first started, they were expanding throughout the country, every week there were classes of 40 new hires going through training, consistently, year-round at every location. They always said accuracy was more important than speed, and it’s up to the client to tell the other person to slow down if captions can’t keep up."

"At some point, they started putting more emphasis on speed of captions, then began saying speed is equally as important as quality. Eventually, they introduced a few computers (like 3) that would do auto captions, and someone had to sit there following along, correcting errors."

"The number of auto captioning computers kept growing, I left the job, 6 months later they got rid of 95% of the staff."

"The job was actually quite challenging at times in the early years, it used voice recognition software, so the people captioning were actually repeating every word they heard in a clear voice so the software could caption it."

"It worked great when people spoke normally and with relatively proper grammar, but in reality, half the country has thick accents, uses slang, etc Those words all needed to be typed manually."

"It kind of worked like predictive texting, where if it didn’t know what you said, it would take a guess at something similar-sounding and make sense with the context of the last word or two captioned."

"Another issue is that a lot of people speak like a certain orange guy, aggressively spitting nonsense rapidly without taking a breath, interrupting themselves mid-sentence to go off on a tangent, which kills the accuracy of predictive text because it’s trying to make a normal sentence that makes sense."

"Whenever I hear him speak, I think of how awful it would be to caption."

~ sloppyjoesandwich

Customer Support

"This just happened yesterday, so new wounds. They had us train a chatbot, so we made the resources to feed it."

"The chatbot was supposed to help us with the support ticket load. Chatbot now gets to carry the whole load."

"Entire support team got laid off."

~ fartinaround

Data Scientist

"I used to be a data scientist (with 13 years of experience). My boss wanted me to solve a problem that involved clustering sensor data by location."

"Because errors in latitude and longitude tend to be random, we'll have elliptical clouds of points, so I said we should use k-means. My boss picked up his laptop, turned it around, and said: 'But Copilot says that we should use DBSCAN'."

"I researched DBSCAN and found that it would be very slow and do the wrong thing in a worse way. My boss did not agree. I was laid off a few weeks later, along with the rest of the data team. My boss was laid off two months after that."

"Now the company has an open position for an 'AI Scientist' in India."

~ Utkonos91

Graphic Designer

"Graphic designer here. I haven't been fully replaced yet, but the landscape has completely changed. Clients now expect me to use AI as a 'co-pilot'—generating initial concepts, mood boards, and even rough copy in minutes, not hours."

"The job is becoming less about executing the first idea and more about curating, refining, and adding the crucial human touch (and catching AI's weird mistakes)."

"It feels less like I lost my job and more like my job description was rewritten overnight. The pressure to constantly adapt is the real challenge."

~ silver86racher

Voice Actor

"Voice actor here. While I still get the bigger commercials and jobs, I’ve lost a lot of the smaller jobs."

"For example, storyboarding. Ad agencies will create a digital storyboard detailing what the ad will look like, they hire a voice artist to do a preliminary voice over (you’d earn like 150-200 for the hour), it’s all AI now."

"I’ve worked on campaigns where all of the voice artists refused to sign their contract because there’s a new clause in it—if they sign it, they’re signing the rights of their voice over to AI, so this client can use their voice without them ever having to record anything else again."

"They all refused; the client just recast all of them."

~ angry2320

"My uncle does voice acting. A lot of his work came from audiobooks, but that's drying up lately and being replaced by AI voice."

~ mathazar

Epidemiologist

"I'm an epidemiologist working for a local health department in a team building disease surveillance capacity. Basically, my team makes data cleaning and visualizations automated so we can spend time interpreting the output and detect outbreaks and patterns earlier."

"We all have masters or PhDs in epidemiology/biostatistics. We are being pushed out in the middle of respiratory season at the end of the year so the IT team can make oversimplified graphs that are not useful and use AI for the rest."

"It's absolutely horrifying that our community's health is in the hands of untrained IT and AI."

~ berkosaurus

Have you been impacted by AI?