Author name: Kathryn Hulick

Emily Hanley rubs her face, then takes a breath. “I recently lost my job to AI,” she says, in a video she shared on TikTok. She was a copywriter, or someone who writes the text for brands’ webpages, online articles, email campaigns, and other marketing materials. New generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or Baidu’s Ernie excel at generating text for all sorts of purposes, including this one. Generative AI can also write code. And it’s far cheaper than hiring a person to do the same thing. In an article for Business Insider about the ordeal, Hanley wrote, “While I and countless other out-of-work copywriters are the first wave of AI collateral, the collapse of my profession is probably just the tip of the AI iceberg. ”