‘One day I overheard my boss saying: just put it in ChatGPT’: the workers who lost their jobs to AI

“I’ve been a freelance journalist for 10 years, usually writing for magazines and websites about cinema. I presented a morning show on Radio Kraków twice a week for about two years. It was only one part of my work, but I really enjoyed it. It was about culture and cinema, and featured a range of people, from artists to activists. I remember interviewing Ukrainians about the Russian invasion for the first programme I presented, back in 2022.

I was let go in August 2024, alongside a dozen co-workers who were also part-time. We were told the radio station was having financial problems. I was relatively OK with it, as I had other income streams. But a few months later I heard that Radio Kraków was launching programmes hosted by three AI characters. Each had AI-generated photographs, a biography and a specific personality. They called it an “experiment” aimed at younger audiences.

One of the first shows they did was a live “interview” with Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel prize for literature, who had died 12 years earlier. What are the ethics of using the likeness of a dead person? Szymborska is a symbol of Polish intellectual culture, so it caused outrage. I couldn’t understand it: radio is created by people for other people. We cannot replace our experiences, emotions or voices with avatars.

One of my colleagues who was laid off is queer. One of the new AI avatars was called Alex, a non-binary student and a “specialist” in queer subjects. In Poland, we are still fighting for queer rights, and as journalists it’s incumbent on us to have real representation when reporting on this. For my colleague and the LGBTQ+ community, it was shocking and damaging to hear their lived experience and knowledge being imitated by AI.”

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One day I overheard my boss saying: just build a machine to do it’: the factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. 

They then heard redditors tell them that they just need to learn how to code

I now tell people like this that they need to learn how to turn a wrench or swing a hammer.

This is no different then when blue collar workers were losing their jobs to automation and outsourcing. Nobody cared then and it’s makes it hard for them to care now.

AI has been really great. My father already replaced half a dozen people with AI at the family company. No more hiring some weirdo with pink hair to make the computer code.

This is ultimately a management problem: most bosses have no idea what it takes to get good results from ChatGPT (or any other AI tool). If they did, they would realize that replacing human workers with AI most often leads to lower-quality work, dissatisfied customers, and eventually lower profits.

You can get good results from using AI, but it’s a lot harder than it looks, and employees who can figure it out won’t come cheap.

Yeah I hear my boss saying and doing that a lot and 70% of the output is unusable and out of context. But I do agree if you know what you are doing and quickly understand if the output is in fact relevant and reflects reality, it’s crazy how fast you can move. Takes hours and even days down to 1/10 the time.

My girlfriend works in IT for a small company, I watch her nod and say okay while her boss in meetings will tell staff all his ideas and decisions come from chatgpt. He will say he’s been doing research in chatgpt. He will tell them to do their own research in chatgpt on the ideas he got from chatgpt. He is so blindly confident in this technology and it’s so clearly the root of all the chaos and sudden baffling shifts in direction she’s been struggling with for months. Every team meeting is a new swath of nonsense ideas for the future and it’s turning her job into an exercise is patience.