Did AI kill my journalism job, or open up a next chapter? – Pittsburgh’s Public Source

When I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 24, it was a revelation. The more I learned about the condition, the more I began to understand myself. Feelings of worthlessness, difficulty focusing, emotional dysregulation — all of it could be explained so easily by the chemical misfires in my brain. If only someone had told me sooner! 

As I began to make sense of these new discoveries, I started writing about them, hoping to provide for someone else the resources I had been missing. I had always enjoyed writing fiction, and I earned a bachelor’s degree in screenwriting. In writing about mental health, however, I found a new passion for journalistic writing and advocacy that would change the course of my career – until AI came along, upending the writing industry as a whole.

The first piece of published content I produced was for IDONTMIND, a nonprofit that seeks to inspire open conversations around mental health. The essay is titled “I Am At War With Myself” and chronicles my pandemic-induced experience with derealization. It was a shot in the dark submission; I was shocked they accepted it with no notes. 

Needless to say, it was a validating experience. So, I kept writing. My roommate at the time did some freelance work as an artist and introduced me to Upwork and Fiverr, where I took on a few low-paying writing gigs. I also began publishing pieces about mental health and ADHD on Medium, which eventually led me to editing for the publication Invisible Illness. Suddenly, the idea of making writing my career didn’t seem so far-fetched. I quit my bartending job to pursue freelancing, which would prove to be a rather short-sighted decision.

Finding my voice

Many successful freelance writers write articles about how to be a successful freelance writer, and they also sell courses. I am willing to bet most of their income is from selling courses. I kept reading these articles because I had no clue what I was doing. How do you find clients? How do you make sure those clients actually pay you? What is a good rate to charge? Where and what am I supposed to pitch? You’re telling me I’m supposed to make my own schedule? Didn’t you hear I have ADHD? I can’t plan! 

I worked with some great clients, others less so. I made ends meet. I was nowhere near the levels I’d seen other writers reach. On bad days, all I could think was that I just wanted a full-time job, like the ones you hear about in fairy tales — one with health insurance, PTO and whatever the hell a 401(k) was. Stability. More than anything else, I wanted stability.

For a time, my friend Nick and I hosted a podcast called Conspiracy Realists, a show in which we ostensibly debunked conspiracy theories and cracked jokes. While we were recording an episode about the Mongolian death worm, Nick quoted an online publication I’d never heard of before. It was called All That’s Interesting. As someone who had always been fascinated with weird history, I was easily drawn to a niche site that covered topics like the Dancing Plague of 1518, alien abduction stories and famous hauntings in addition to more serious topics like the death of Hitler and the Russian genocide orchestrated by Josef Stalin. Better yet, they were looking to hire a staff writer. 

Four months later, the day after my 26th birthday, I accepted the job offer. 

‘All That’s Interesting’

It felt like things had finally come together. I could call myself a writer and back up the claim with not just a portfolio of published works but an actual title. I was getting paid the same rate each month. Each day, all I had to do was open a Google sheet to see my assignment and write it. The stress of hunting for clients and sending pitches was gone. I worked from home, had lovely coworkers, and genuinely liked what I was doing. And when you spend your mornings writing daily news about scientific and archaeological discoveries and your afternoons writing about history, you tend to learn interesting facts to bring up in conversation, an added perk for sure. 

During the three years and seven months I worked at ATI, I wrote more than 1,200 articles, hosted over 100 episodes of the History Uncovered podcast, and grew our social presence by turning clips from our podcast into short form video content. I wore multiple hats, because I wanted to make myself invaluable. Despite the changing media landscape and mass layoffs across most industries, I chose to believe that my job, now that I’d earned it, was safe. Perhaps I was in denial. Mostly, I was afraid of going back to that uncertain, unstable time before I’d had a salary. 

But the same year I joined ATI, something else happened. OpenAI released ChatGPT, a tool now so ubiquitous that no one even questions what a “GPT” even is. (I still don’t know, do you?) Other AI models soon joined the fray, and I don’t feel it’s necessary to explain here the pervasiveness of this technology. 

Many writers feared that they would be the first ones to lose their jobs to AI. I did not share this fear, though I feel my heart rate spike every time I use an em-dash now — and you can pry them from my cold, dead hands when I’m gone. I saw value in human writing. I still do, and believe most people agree. We’ve gotten better at identifying AI-generated text, and while there are certainly a litany of websites out there publishing AI-generated articles, readers generally seem averse to them now. 

I was foolish to think none of this would affect me. 

I wasn’t replaced by AI. In fact, ATI’s editors made it very clear that they would never publish AI-generated articles. But AI was still a disruptive force. Search traffic fell. Google changed the rules on SEO and AdSense. We had editors quit or move on to other jobs, but we never hired anyone else to fill their positions. Our team of 12 became a team of seven, and for the better part of two years we were struggling to put out enough content to satisfy the algorithms. I was burning out constantly, still holding on to the idea that this was surely better than self-employment. 

Then, I was called into a meeting and told I was being let go at the end of January.

Waves of optimism 

It wasn’t a complete surprise. I knew we weren’t making as much money as we used to. I knew that, if anyone was going to be laid off, it would likely be me, given I was still the newest hire on the team. 

It wasn’t that I was replaced by AI, or that AI-generated articles were taking all of the search traffic; it was that a great number of people have stopped reading entirely, opting instead to simply ask ChatGPT or Gemini for answers to their questions. It’s an extension of the same issue that has caused many local news outlets to cease operations or cut staff.

There were no hard feelings. In fact, I even left feeling somewhat optimistic about the future, the free time I now had, and what I could do with it. Unfortunately, February never fails to send me into a depressive state, especially with this city’s gray skies. Bitter winter days are made doubly so when your future is uncertain, but I found some comfort in taking a beat to sort things out. I reached out to friends, leaned on my partner for support, and put work — both the hunt for it and the self-imposed pressure to create content — on hold for a few weeks to get my mind right. Now, standing on the other side of it, I don’t view that as time wasted.

As spring comes around, can I say I’m optimistic about my future? Frankly, it comes in waves, the valleys largely occurring whenever I have to schedule a $650 monthly student loan payment. There have been mornings I’ve broken down in tears, anxious about my credit score and lack of savings. There have been other mornings I’ve felt more creative and driven than I have in years. 

I find the most value in the people around me, in the community I’ve built. I’m surrounded by creative, ambitious people who likewise encourage me to be more creatively ambitious. Some of them are friends I’ve had for more than a decade; others I’ve only gotten close to recently. In either case, knowing I have people I can turn to for support, reassurance and, when needed, a reality check has been the most significant motivator in persevering through tough times. 

At the end of the day, community is what matters most. And I’m damn lucky to have a good one. 

Austin Harvey is a writer, editor, and podcast producer with more than 1,100 published articles and can be reached at his website austincharvey.com or at austincharvey@proton.me.