Has my career died before it even started?

Originally Published March 10, 2025

As an 18 year old I am now at an age where I need to decide what I want to do with my life. This can be a daunting position to be in, especially now considering the rise of AI. To me, the idea of freelance writing was appealing. Being able to work your own hours, work remotely and most importantly it is something I enjoy- I learnt from my last job enjoyment is most important for me. Although recent developments might have changed the appeal of freelance writing. 

I recently stumbled across a YouTube video by Alex Wei titled 'Happy 2025. I lost my freelance writing job to AI.' Naturally I clicked on it. In the video he mentions how he had been working with one company and doing blog articles for them for the last couple of years however they had stopped providing work for him recently. The freelance equivalent of being sacked you could say. 

The reason? As you can probably guess from the introduction, AI. With the use of AI the company had gone from producing one article per week to one article per day. You could class this as a noticeable increase in efficiency while the standard of the work remained strong. Just like that the need for freelance writers has diminished significantly. All you need now is someone to produce an AI article and add a bit more of a human touch to it and you have a good quality piece within minutes. 

With the need for freelance writers reduced and companies capable of switching to AI at any moment, it leaves me questioning. Is it still worth pursuing? AI can produce blog articles in seconds. Unfortunately, neither me or you can match that efficiency and and we also cost considerably more than a subscription fee for an AI software. It is not just one AI tool we are competing with either, we are competing against an army of specialised tools. This was demonstrated by the AI generated summary of Alex Wei's YouTube video. As Wei said' AI took my job and then told the story of it.' 

As stated in the video, which amassed over 700,000 views since it was published, how can you not be at least a little bit concerned? AI is here now and for the younger generation, in fact everyone actually, need to take this into account moving forwards now. I hate manual labour but as a career prospect it is a much safer option than freelance writing in 2025. 

This is not the position I wanted or expected to be in 2 years ago but that is the reality of mine and many others situation right now. Nobody can predict the future but it is going to be a very interesting next couple of years.