AI is replacing me

this newsletter is a cry for help

when I started this newsletter it was all about loab, the first AI cryptid, and the weird’n’wacky tendrils of web that lolled about alongside her. loab grew in the weird internet.

that internet is rotting. I’ve mentioned dead internet theory here before; at the time I was pointing out AI and bots were supplanting people online.

people are now straight-up channelling AI. LinkedIn comments, blogs, support chats; all wearing the face of a person and being paid like a person, but that person is a conduit for some company AI. zombie internet is here.

I’ve been absent from this newsletter for a while because I have had my brain eaten by zombies.

this newsletter is a cry for help.

I work in marketing. I won’t get into ultra-specifics of requests for privacy reasons, but it’s fair to say that every task on my list is something I’m told to “get ChatGPT to do”. my role has morphed into an AI conduit. but I want to do work.

over the past several years, at different companies, I have faced:

senior leadership requesting thousands of pieces of AI dross that I will need to either burn out quality checking, or let go into the ether knowing my professional reputation will disintegrate further with every hallucination published.

AI-generated social media, spitting out basic graphics and LinkedIn posts that read “Our customers wanted to 10x their ROI. And honestly? We felt that.” I should like the five different CEOs commenting “Great insights!”.

I’ve been told to “be more strategic” by “using AI to write hundreds of blogs a week”.

I think these two things are pretty incompatible, unless you believe “more strategic” means “ensuring our potential customers are force-fed the same three value props in increasingly fluffy, research-void essays that rewrite the point so many times the point blurs into digital mud and the prospect walks away going “what the fuck does “it’s not work, it’s utilizing humanity’s greatest asset: productivity” mean??””.

I have been told that to rank [company] in LLMs, I should ask said LLMs to write hundreds of blogs about [company].

effectively: to feed the AI, I should eat the AI. me and ChatGPT should perform a never-ending dance of content zombification, consuming each other’s turds over and over. and then LinkedIn bros can drop their own tiny turds in the comments.

I am choking on existential turd sludge.

something I’ve heard a lot is “AI is the new internet. you need to get on board or be left behind”.

AI is actually not like the internet. the internet created jobs and opened the world up to people. AI closes the world down to a single, black-and-white chat box. the echo chamber is so small it’s now just you yelling into a matrix designed to validate your outbursts.

not like me, who yells into a newsletter designed to prompt worried texts from my mum.

(I would love to post stuff like this on LinkedIn but it would make me even more unemployable than this newsletter will.)

in my city there are no jobs in my field at my level. if I wanted to take a significant pay cut, I could get work actually making things instead of prompting for nine hours a day.

I am not a total luddite.

in my last role I created AI guidelines and a library of files to feed into Claude, which I knew they would replace me with.

in my current role I have, similarly, created company files around personas, grammar guidelines, messaging etc. for team members to use in ChatGPT projects. I sometimes ask it to pull specific data from interviews and research.

I don’t object to speeding up processes.

I object to not doing work.

I like writing. when I was a kid I wanted to be an author. I wrote stories all through school, then wrote for the student newspaper at uni, then joined a content mill briefly before jumping into journalism and having a grand old time before the pressure of not getting paid much and getting several death threats meant I made the switch to marketing.

once there, I jumped all over original work; I love case studies, I love chatting with customers and partners, and I love turning those yarns into juicy hooks and videos and write-ups.

I left my last job because AI exacerbated an already fierce focus on quantity over quality. I could no longer have any pride in my output. my team was scrambling to vomit up zero-thought, reactionary blogs, ads, decks, events, etc. I think they did a good job given the environment.

but I wanted to be great. I wanted to make things people would enjoy. so I hopped to a purpose-driven company in the hope that would give me my own purpose.

it didn’t. I’ve been told by several people I shouldn’t “aim for perfection”, which is corporate speak for “use the AI-generated version”. my personal stance: “factually accurate” and “contains an original thought” are not synonymous with “perfection”. they’re actually the bare minimum for marketing that’s impactful and useful to customers.

but perhaps the old ways are dying.

I am a haggard stoop-sitter screaming at AI to get off my lawn.

my work will, once again, be consumed and shat out as an AI replica; while my human form, eaten away a little more by the zombies, moves on to its next post before total obliteration.

I think I’m writing this in the hope someone will message me and say they work in marketing and they’re senior and they get to actually make stuff.

maybe someone has a winning lotto ticket they can give me so I can write a novel that AI will summarise.

or maybe a kindly old couple will take me to a farm where I can live out the rest of my days as a free range rescue from the zombie internet.

please, just let me write something.

this newsletter was written without AI.