A 22-year-old student from Kolkata, who worked as a copywriter and a ghost writer, has said that she lost her job due to ChatGPT and can now hardly make 10% of what she used to make, news agency SWNS reported.
A postgraduate biologic science student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Sharanya Battacharya, used to work as a ghostwriter and copywriter for a creative solutions agency and wrote SEO-optimsed articles each week for it while pursuing her degree and earned over $240 a month.
AI entered, work walked out
After ChatGPT entered the picture, the number of articles out for Sharanya to grab dropped and she was reduced to writing one or two articles per month. She claims the firms who used to commission her work started relying on artificial intelligence (AI).
She added that the firms gave her “no explanation” for the reduction in her workload. However, she suspects ChatGPT was being used by the firms to cut costs.
“It has been really tough since the reduction in my workload — not just for me but my family, too,” she told SWNS. Sharanya said her income supports both her mother and herself. Her mother, Bandana (45), sells sarees.
Ever since her income has reduced, they have had to “cut back” on living expenses, which Sharanya says has been “extremely rough”. Describing her life after the reduction, she said her mother and her have had to monitor their food consumption. “We no longer do things we used to enjoy doing like going out to eat — we can only do that once every couple of months now,” she added. “We’ve had to focus our money on the necessities, like food and bills, to make sure we can live fine,” she noted.
With her life “extremely uncertain”, Sharanya faces potential unemployment in a “cutthroat” job market. She explains that there are a lot of good copywriters being affected in India and around the world. She added that she has been anxious and feeling lost for the past couple of months and has also had panic attacks.
The 22-year-old hopes that in future there will be a way allowing humans to incorporate AI with their copywriting skills to “work together to yield overall, better results”.