Man says ‘no industry is safe’ after losing his job to AI twice

By Tom Jeffreys

A man who lost his job to AI twice in 40 days says "no industry is safe."

Liam Rondi, 30, had been working as a copywriter for Clickout Media for two years but received a call on a "random Monday" from an HR employee he'd never met to tell him he'd been made redundant, he says.

In the same week, Press Gazette reported the company had laid off some writers and replaced them with a crew of AI editors.

Liam said he had "zero inclination" that he'd be made redundant but said in hindsight that he should have recognized some "red flags," including the introduction of AI training and a strategic move to have writers edit AI-generated copy rather than write from scratch.

Liam, who has built a big enough TikTok following to earn online, initially transitioned straight into another freelance copywriting role, only to receive an email informing him that the company would "no longer be using freelance writers" but would instead be "rolling out a range of AI tools."

He says the replacement of humans in creative jobs is "abhorrent."

He insists that it can't currently do a good job, with the effort of correcting factually erroneous content, particularly in sensitive subject matters like gambling content, more time-consuming than writing himself.

Nonetheless, Liam, who moved from London to Montpellier in 2024 with husband Xavier, has warned against complacency, saying "everyone needs to be cautious because companies will always want to cut costs, and if that means getting rid of people's jobs for something less capable, so be it."

Liam said: "I'm feeling betrayed and undervalued because I never expected it to happen to me, but it can happen to anyone.

"On losing the second job, it definitely felt a lot scarier because it was the last bit of freelancing I had. For them to also choose AI so soon after losing my main role felt like a slight slap in the face and made me seriously start considering training in a totally different role.

"I feel frustrated and worried at the lack of opportunities in the job market too — I'm wondering if it's time for me to pivot careers even though I still love copywriting and think it's really important.

"Job security was never a worry for me, even just two years ago when I found my last role the job boards were full, but now they're barren. Most of the roles I've applied for have involved AI in some stretch so as much as I wish I could avoid it, I can't. It's everywhere."

Exasperated, Liam, a copywriter of nine years, posted about his experience on LinkedIn and now has a new freelancing role offered by a company that is anti-AI, he says.

"I can see how AI can have its benefits in terms of speeding things up," he said.

"I can see the potential for it to make people's lives easier and it should be developed carefully.

"But in the case of it stealing people's art and jobs, that's definitely abhorrent. There's also the environmental impact.

"What concerns me is that we're never going to get any new ideas anymore, and it's never going to be as effective as a human even if we do sometimes take more time.

"At the moment it's just stealing copy and repurposing what's already out there. In my experience, it wasn't capable of doing my job properly, even with the latest, best models available.

"There would be so many errors and factual inaccuracies so I would spend just as much time, if not more, going through and correcting it. It would just be regurgitating a lot of content that was AI-written already, so stuff that was already incorrect, it became an endless cycle. It was pretty dire."

One of Liam's motivations for growing his social media accounts is to warn people of the red flags of AI, and how to spot whether their job is at risk.

"The company policy was always that if anyone used AI to write anything, they would lose their job. Then there was this sudden turnaround where we had to embrace it.

"We were given training, and to start with it was a combination of AI and human-written content, but their main goal was to just turn out content as fast as possible.

"I don't think any industry that isn't manual labor is safe at the moment. AI's improving at such a scary rate and companies are being way too hasty."

Clickout Media did not respond to a request for comment.