“The Experiment Didn’t Work”: People Whose Jobs Were Taken Over By AI Are Sharing Their Experiences, And Spoiler Alert, These Bots Are A DISASTER

In 2026, AI has become inescapable — it’s everywhere. Seemingly every single company on the planet has come up with a way to shoehorn AI into their product, and almost always for the worse (remember being able to Google something and get actual answers?). With the rise of this artificial intelligence, the fears surrounding robots taking away human jobs have also risen, and not for no reason.

Recently, Reddit user damnmorningstar asked the community to tell their AI stories, prompting, “People who got laid off because of AI, what was your job?” Over 600 people weighed in with their experiences, some were just as horrible as you’d imagine, but others gave me the slightest glimmer of hope that maybe AI is a whole lot dumber and more expensive than people think, and humans will be the victors in the upcoming robot wars. Here’s what everyone had to say:

1. “I worked in outbound sales at a tech company, and in late 2023, I was replaced by AI. Someone in the company’s recruitment department contacted me a couple of days ago to say that they’re hiring outbound salespeople again. Obviously, the experiment didn’t work.”

—u/MetalCorrBlimey

2. “I was the guy who had to write the ‘friendly, human-sounding’ automated rejection emails. The irony is not lost on me.”

—u/Economy-Progress-194

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3. “I was a storyboard artist for some very popular animated shows. Fuck AI and fuck ‘artists’ and ‘directors’ who allowed AI to take over real artists’ jobs.”

—u/iConfessor

4. “I worked at a call center that handled an account for phone captioning services (phone for people with hearing loss.) I was a captioner until we were told the account had to be closed since they were opting for AI assistance instead. All employees under that account were laid off. A year and a half later, it was reopened, and they’re hiring real people again. I guess it didn’t work out with AI.”

—u/ravagedjs

5. “I trained AI at a big tech company. Things went great for a while, then their stock dipped for the first time in 20 years, and I was suddenly out of a job. I use that experience to explain to all of the people insisting that AI will just create new jobs that this is not the case. There is little to no demand for people with experience with these models in any capacity; the only upside is they’re not as effective at replacing labor as the ruling class would hope.”

—u/pantan

6. “Ex-girlfriend lost her physical therapy/wellbeing advisor role to an AI app. She was later rehired to advise people on how to use the app.”

—u/NectarineSudden757

7. “Game developer (gameplay engineer). I wasn’t necessarily replaced by AI, but rather laid off due to the effects of AI spending.”

—u/SacredHat

“Same boat. Last summer, the developers took my art and fed it into an AI model to spew out new art based on my style. I hate this timeline. After they used my art, their profile disappeared from Upwork. I have no idea what happened to them.”

—u/Lavenin

“Worked on a Microsoft game as a game developer, and had no idea they were using my own damn work to train AI to replace me. Got laid off three days before Christmas.”

—u/InkyRavel

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8. “I was a technical writer for a software firm. My entire department was ‘sunsetted’ because management figured the AI documentation was ‘80% there.’ What they didn’t realize is that the last 20% is where the actual safety and logic live. Now, instead of a clean manual, customers have to spend hours prompting a chatbot to explain why the software is showing them an error.”

—u/DegTrader

9. “A relative of mine worked as an insurance ‘go-between’ for a hospital. They would basically fight for patients’ coverage and related issues. The job evolved into fighting AI on denied claims, then it was just replaced by AI altogether. He felt like it was now AI vs AI. But really, I think they’re all in cahoots to maximize profits on both ends.

—u/damargemirad

10. “Members of my team were laid off due to AI. I’m a compliance officer at a business that deals mostly with business utilities. One of the biggest parts of my job is listening to sales calls to determine if they were conducted compliantly (to ensure we are selling everything legally). We tried to move this to AI since it can cover more calls than a team of 20 people and allows us to concentrate on other areas of the business. They laid off five people from my team, anticipating that we won’t need as many people. That was six months ago, and the AI is horrible. Utter disaster. We now have fewer people doing more of these audits in addition to the other work that was planned, and burnout is real.”

—u/Dense_Ad7115

11. “I was not laid off, but I witnessed others. In a previous job at a hospital, they had a pool of medical secretaries, about 40 people transcribing dictations, writing letters, etc. They moved to an AI system. Now, AI transcribes/writes the letters and does the dictations, and just a few people check the output. What used to be a whole floor in a building is now a small office.”

—u/0oITo0

12. “Soundtrack composer for advertising. Considering how much that job was paid, it doesn’t shock me too much that greedy companies go with AI now, but it still sucks a lot.”

—u/brando_baum

“I’m a game composer, and this scares me. I have heard some obviously AI-generated music in ads, and it’s just stream of consciousness rambling.”

—u/MaddyDaddy

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13. “A friend of mine was a secretary for a big firm. Her manager thought that AI could do her job, so bye-bye, not even a goodbye party. But guess who had to call my friend because AI doesn’t know the telephone number of the firm’s most loyal customer.”

—u/maurocastrov

“My friend got laid off for similar reasons, and when his boss called, he told him his knowledge was gonna be expensive. He was kept on as a consultant for $300/hr.”

—u/Unrigg3D

14. “I was a writer for software companies from 2017 to 2023. The work was a mix of ghost writing for C Suite and senior engineers, technical education, and marketing. I remember the first client meeting where they included a completed ChatGPT article as a ‘starting point.’ That was in July 2023. They (and all my other clients) did not renew their contracts. By October 2023, I was broke and looking for work in the trades.”

—u/Mediocre-Coconut-346

15. “My graphic designer friend has had several clients drop him because they now use AI for their logos. Some others threatened the use of AI to try to lower his rate, saying, ‘Why should I pay that much when I can just use AI?'”

—u/OneMoreTime998

“Graphic designer here. I got laid off ‘indirectly’ because of AI. My manager was not a designer and had no idea how anything worked (had no clue about differences in RGB and CMYK; didn’t understandwhy we couldn’t just send any digital design directly to print; vector vs rasterized; layers – literally knew nothing). However, like so many leadership people, she was amazed by ‘what AI could do’ and would ask me every single day why I didn’t do my task with AI. Told me that refusing to use AI was a problem, so I was part of the next company-wide layoff. It’s been six months, and nothing visual gets done anymore. Maybe a social media image made with the templates I created, but no changes on the website, no website image assets, no PDFs to download, nothing. Lots of people left the company on their own, without anything new on the horizon; many leadership people were laid off later as well. The company is going down.”

—u/VincentVentura

16. “Software engineer here. I left for parental leave, came back, and my entire team (plus most of the floor I worked on) had been fired. Then my former boss’s boss scheduled a meeting for four days later. At least they kept me through my leave, but it’s fucking soulless firing someone with a newborn. I spent the rest of last year being a stay-at-home dad, applying for jobs. Made it to six final rounds, but they all decided not to move forward even after glowing feedback.

“Now I’m back in school getting prerequisites for a master’s in bioinformatics. Maybe I’m wasting my time, and by the time I’m done, AI will have wiped that out too, but I’ve spent a decade building software for companies that aren’t actually doing anything to make the world better. They just want to drag more profit out of their customers. Fuck that. I want to do research and make the world better. Maybe that’s idealistic, idk. But I’m gonna try.”

—u/PangolinPalantir

17. “It seems pretty short-sighted to allow AI take over so many jobs just to cut costs for the immediate future. Replacing entry-level or administrative employees with AI might work in the short term, but in a few years, upper management will begin to retire, and you won’t have enough human employees with institutional knowledge of the business, the culture, etc., who can fill the ranks. The AI itself will stagnate and fall into crappy feedback loops without fresh input from humans. AI can and should be used as a tool to support human innovation, not to replace it. But there is too much greed and desire for immediate profit. This will bite us in the ass, in a major way.”

—u/ShimmeringRage

18. “I work for a company that does translations. We’ve been informed by clients that translation done by AI was so much cheaper than using us, so at best, we can be hired to edit AI work. Last year, there were three months with zero work at all. This year, nothing yet. We know there is a single project coming up, but that’s it. We may be closing the company this year.”

—u/Testing_Waters2342

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19. “Self-employed voice actor and speech coach for 10 years. My income is down more than 70%. Companies are using AI to narrate their in-house videos, meaning voice actors are losing massive amounts of day-to-day work. Private individuals are using ‘AI clones’ of themselves to present for them, rather than learning how to improve their presenting skills. Lastly, all of my textbooks were stolen and rewritten by ChatGPT/AI slop writers, so my book sales have gone from £400-£600 a month to £80-£100 at best. I’m currently looking for a job or a new business idea.”

—u/GandalfTheTartan

20. “I quit my corporate copywriting job to become a freelance writer literally the same day that ChatGPT was released. Probably the worst day in human history to decide to write for a living. I reskilled into SEO (search engine optimization) and got another job, but now Google’s AI Mode is moving towards basically eradicating organic traffic from Google altogether. So AI has cost me my job twice.”

—u/womensrugbynet

21. “Statistics professor. They didn’t specifically say it was because of AI, but the university figured we didn’t need a department if people could use AI to do their experimental design/analysis, and they didn’t see the value in statistics research in and of itself. We only exist to serve other departments. Who needs statisticians in an era of AI?? Hilariously, when we asked AI to make cuts based on the data it claimed to use, it said not to cut most of the departments that were cut because they were too important, and to try to cut admin. So yes, AI is more aware than administrators.”

—u/a_statistician

22. And finally, “My job was to guzzle tens of thousands of gallons of fresh water every day in drought-prone areas.”

—u/Ganglebot

Has your job been affected in any way by AI? Tell me about your experience in the comments or use the anonymous form below. Your response may be featured in an upcoming BuzzFeed article!

Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.

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