Ann shared her story as part of MECEP’s State of Working Maine 2026 report. Click here to read the full report.
Ann was the copy writer for a US subsidiary of a European toy company. Since we last spoke with her for this report, Ann has been laid off.
When I first started working here, I was doing it all, juggling multiple brands, each with their own voice and their own distinct requirements. I was writing product descriptions with my brain and my ideas, creatively. I was also writing blog posts, email copy, and texts. Our toys are sold on Amazon and in all the major stores. We also do wholesale. So, we have a business-to-business site, a business-to-consumer site. The copy has to be slightly different for all those sites.
We started using a lot of different marketing optimization tools, and then AI started to come into the picture pretty seriously about a year and a half ago. There were only five of us on the marketing team so I guess the thought was, rather than hire, let’s just leverage the tools.
The company mandate was to use AI as much as possible. As the tools started to get better, we were pushed to use it more often, and really understand it and embrace it and run everything through it. That’s when my job shifted to training the robots. I fed all the writing for the company I’d ever done into the robot.
It was supposed to make my life less complicated, but I was finding that I had to edit it and train it considerably, and in the beginning it was still not that great. It took a while for it to actually know my voice. But now, this year with our latest AI tool, “Cassidy” does. It’s me. It’s doing my voice.
Cassidy is like a mega, mega robot. It has access to everything – our inventory management system, internal spreadsheets, and data analysis. It has access to our optimization tools, our voice documents, blogs, website — everything we’ve ever created. Agent Cassidy can now do an Amazon listing for me. It connects to the optimization tool, gets the keywords, writes the copy, and creates the listing. I barely have to edit it, and then I plug it into a spreadsheet to be uploaded.
So now I am going through cells on a spreadsheet, checking each one. It’s just so much more tedious than anything I’ve ever done in my life. Because it still makes mistakes, and so you do have to check it, but it’s not your own work. It’s so unbelievably uninteresting and uncreative. It’s also incredibly draining, because there’s no satisfaction or agency. I’m not coming up with exciting campaigns. There’s no skin in the game. The robot completely cuts me out of it.
I never, ever, even in a minute of my lifetime expected that I would be a robot editor. That’s my job — I edit robots. It makes me feel sick. It makes me feel really gross. It feels really bad on my soul.
I told my boss that I don’t want to do it anymore. I have teaching credentials, I have librarian credentials. I’ve written 18 books. I have a master’s degree. This is entry level work. There’s no more teamwork, there’s no more problem solving. I know I should be able to soldier on, but it really does feel like meaningless work at this point.