For thirteen years, Trudy Schulte had been typing medical notes for physicians in Western Australia. She was skilled at it; she was precise, dependable, and the type of employee who, over the course of a long career, quietly establishes a solid professional reputation without drawing attention to herself. Sitting contentedly in what had seemed like a safe niche, she was sixty years old and had seven years till retirement. After using an AI transcribing tool called i-scribe for a few weeks, her practice’s working hours decreased from twenty-four to about one per week. Not a single day. An hour.
The obvious transitional function that would have kept her talents in use and her salary intact was to review the AI transcripts for errors, which she offered to do. She was not pursued by anyone. She says, “I had no complaints about my work, and I was accurate,” but there’s no resentment in the way she puts it; it’s just a straightforward statement from someone attempting to make sense of something that doesn’t quite make sense.
The freelance economy is being affected by generative AI in a way that no prior wave of automation was able to handle: it is affecting workers who had deliberately chosen occupations that appeared immune to automation, occupations characterized by creativity, judgment, and the kind of trained human perception that machines were supposedly decades away from replicating. the illustrators who spent years developing their portfolios. The animators are training to create kid-friendly cartoons. The copywriters who acquired the ability to read a brief and identify an angle.
The voice actors knew what a line reading required and developed their instrument via practice. These are not physically demanding jobs performed by factory assembly workers. They are individuals who selected their professions in part because they seemed particularly, obstinately human. In any case, the technology arrived quickly enough that anyone who had plans for the changeover had no time to develop them.
Taylor Leslie is an animation student in Melbourne. She was inspired to create cartoons that assist kids comprehend their own feelings by the television she grew up watching. She is still enrolled. She will continue to finish. However, midway through her degree, she is also considering other options, such as school support work, which involves working with children and doesn’t necessitate employment in the field she trained for.
“I’ve started to think about roles that I would like that won’t be affected by AI,” she states, “and unfortunately, in the arts industry, that’s practically zero.” The candor of that statement, coming from a student who hasn’t graduated yet, is the kind of information that doesn’t appear in labor market statistics yet is likely more predictive of future trends than the quarterly employment numbers.
Then there is Tom, a young kid from New South Wales who studied IT during the epidemic and graduated into a market where AI had absorbed the entry-level work he trained for. Tom’s identity is unknown, which is telling in and of itself because it seems embarrassing enough to remain nameless. He paid forty thousand dollars for a degree that he earned with honors. He says it’s worthless.
He says, “I’ll be lucky to get a job at Bunnings and avoid being homeless,” which is real enough in its emotional core to be taken seriously but dark enough to be dismissed. Among the first casualties of coding-capable AI are the entry-level software development jobs, such as debugging, documentation, and routine coding duties, that young graduates were expected to use as the start of a career. This is not how it was designed. However, no one stopped it either.
As a freelance writer who has been dealing with this longer than most, Cassy Polimeni has reached a position that is a combination of practicality and refusal. She is submitting for grant writing, which is the type of ethically and contextually sensitive writing where human interaction with the funding organization is crucial and AI often struggles. She is a children’s book author. She conducts workshops on reading.
She says that the labor of cleaning up machine-generated text is “too dystopian,” hence she has decided not to pursue AI editing positions. She will prioritize other tasks, such as using her hands. That statement struck a balance between defiance and resignation, which is arguably the most accurate way to characterize what it’s like to be a talented creative worker watching the market for your particular skills restructure around you in real time without getting your consent or acknowledging that something was lost.
