Hi guys!! I just graduated with my Bachelor’s in English. Immediately after graduating, I moved to a new city. I have a retail job now, but I’m constantly checking online job boards for potential long-term opportunities. It seems like every posted job calls for writing that will be used to train AI. It would absolutely kill me to stoop to that level; one of my final projects in undergrad was a research project which argued against the use of AI writing. I have no real professional or academic network in my new city, and though I’m meeting tons of new people, networking in person is not easy. Is anyone else having the same problem? And what did you do to get out of this rut?!
Look at university employment opportunities via their writing centers and academic advising departments. For as much as AI is becoming commonplace at university, there’s a sincere desire to keep it limited if people trained in and passionate about writing with a human voice (and helping others find and hone their own!) keep showing up at their door. Good luck!
Have you looked at any jobs that don't involve writing, such as tutoring, academic advising, or teaching ESL? Something like this could offer you stability while you start building a portfolio of writing and working toward a full-time writing job. You might also explore types of writing that are less likely to be affected by AI, such as UX writing, grant writing, and compliance (not a writing job per se, but it can involve a lot of writing). Right now, the job market is awful for a lot of reasons and it's taking most new grads longer to find their feet. Good luck!
Do you read magazines? I'm reading one right now and can't help but find errors. Many mastheads provide contact information, never hurts to launch a pitch and a resume
I have a BA, MA and Ph.D. in English. Through a side door I created a career in speechwriting/ghostwriting and later digital marketing communications. Four years ago I realized I could no longer make a living in communications. Not any aspect. I do writing as a hobby. To earn income I am in a whole different career field. But that is slowing down in demand. If you want advice: Be willing to enter new career territory and to keep doing that over and over again.
Damn I really wanted an English degree but it seems like a bad ROI these days
To be fair the job market is just crap in general nowadays. I just went back to school and I think I'll hide out in academia until the dust settles
Has an English degree ever historically had a good ROI?
Any degree can be incredibly valuable but some degrees are much harder for the average person to prove valuable. I think the biggest detriment is adaptability.
I’m not sure tbh. All I know is that ever since I became an adult, English degrees haven’t had a good ROI. But I only became an adult 5 years ago so idk what life was like back in the day.
Could you please share what you do now and how did you pivot into it if you don't mind?
look into grant writing jobs for non for profit establishments. Those pay very well.
Entry level grant writer jobs don't exist anymore.
This is very true.
Creatives will always have jobs trust!! You will not have to train ai. Your writing skills can be utilitarian in a way ai will never be able to replicate.
In a similar boat. LOL TMI, I chose not to give up on my morals but am suffering the financial and housing consequences of that. Job + housing instability.
lmao got this post notification right in the middle of applying for one as a desperate attempt to earn anything. seriously though what can i even do in the UK
i was desperate for a job a while back so I applied for like ten of these AI training jobs. For one of them, they wanted me to do a live test where I fix all of the mistakes in this paragraph about MLK Jr. while this manager watched. They said I had to find at least 5 but I found like 20 and they acted really bothered with it and never called me back.
It seems there are a small number of AI-based companies spamming the job boards with ads calling for AI training positions. I can't say for sure that they are junk, but I find them very suspect. I have yet to hear from a real person who is doing this (AI training) as a steady job that pays well. It's hard to even say what it would involve. Be very careful!
sigh same, finishing my English undergrad next semester. Looking at the job market, I really wish I had chosen a STEM major back in freshman year.
The sad part is that they're also experiencing issues with the job market.
Isn’t AI replacing them too?
Probably to some degree, but I don’t think anyone can argue in good faith that STEM degrees aren’t the more lucrative option with an overall better ROI.
Eh, not necessarily, STEM is definitely not a monolith in that regard.
For instance: Advertising/PR, Art History, History, Foreign Languages, Philosophy, and English graduates all have a much lower unemployment rate than Physics, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Sciences/Management, and Chemistry graduates as per the New York Fed research. It really depends on the major and it's hard to paint an "overall" picture.
Also AI is absolutely targeting the STEM field as well, especially in the computer science fields.
Go look at the underemployment statistics and it paints a different picture, but that’s always a fun game to play (though I do look forward to impressing customers with my useless dinner party knowledge as the lead barista at my local coffee shop) End of the day I’d way rather be graduating with a degree that’s designed to fit into our economic world rather than a humanities degree, that was my point.
End of the day, I'd rather just have a job, but that's just me I guess 🙂↕️
I hear ya on that
I research ai, mostly to help with ethics and understanding on how to use it on a moral level. What theyre asking is really odd honestly. To train ai from a LLM, you need 10-50 pieces of writing. And essentially, it would copy your 'style', sentence structure, use of words, and burstiness (how your flow is). Because LLMs read like a dry research paper now, they're looking for ways to create large scale content that mirrors authenticity.
So, would they give you a job, write 50 things, and let you go? I dont blame you for not wanting to do that.
I dont know what you would do otherwise, or what you want to do, but I suggest you find a niche you like and one that can have you afford housing and food. Just find another thing you like, you might be able to write documentation for it, or write policy. You could also move towards community education like library science or tutoring, although those are hard to sustain currently. I really feel for you though, its not fair that its such a thing now. Eventually ai will settle and be less prominent, but its going to be a few years :(
Too late. All of your activity here is used to train AI. And I’d wager a lot of other online activity, but I don't know you.
Just an FYI “used to train AI” can mean literally anything. It doesn’t necessarily mean training generative AI, it can mean training content moderation, quality assurance, plagiarism, etc or even that the company wants to reserve the right to use it but doesn’t actually know for what.
I just had a discussion with a publisher about this. I specifically asked what kind of AI they will be training, and they couldn't answer, other than to say that they want to be able to use it to train AI at some point.
Sigh.
That means they have no use now, but wanna hop on the bandwagon at some point.
I work in the insurance industry.
Keep seeing those ads…..Wanting a Statistician to train AI to take one’s job
I feel this. It absolutely upsets me. The only comfort is that these companies are burning money away with ai and it will eventually crash.
ai job market is rough so i focused on building my own content and portfolio and rightblogger just made that way easier to stay consistent and show real skills.
ESL could be your call, ESL teachers are always in demand
Hang it up Unc, AI is the future for better or for worse, the first mistake was majoring in English, don’t make a second mistake
This is like saying you don’t want to use a personal computer in 1992. Good luck to you
People generally hold the idea that AI is different than other tools and technologies that humans have adapted over the years, since companies ultimately use it to (or eventually wish to) replace human labor and creativity and reduce human involvement and cost in projects that would otherwise be guided entirely and faithfully by humans. AI is more of a revolution than the computer or the calculator or the typewriter. It is a tool being used not to do the menial work of humans but to think and act for them entirely, if possible. It’s obvious why this is seen as dystopian and heartless. People should familiarize themselves with AI since it may be unavoidable, but equating it to a timeline that’s decades old lacks foresight of the greater problem at hand.
Does it? Does it really moistmuffin?
Lol
Yeah while I’m all for keeping AI out of the arts, pretending like it’s going away in the world of business or government is Luddite behavior
AI is actually making companies burn money. It will collapse.
I’m getting downvoted like I’m saying something which isn’t obvious okay
You're on reddit what did you expect
Unfortunately a i is here to stay
How do you figure?