This writer's client replaced him with “AI” — then “AI” summaries came for his YouTube money
Your TL;DR Briefing on things worth tracking — and talking about over your next power lunch. *Wink.* This time the thing is the age of “AI-sterity” coming for creative gigs.
The thing is:
Early this month, a YouTuber and freelance writer, Alex Wei of Arizona, posted a viral video sharing how a client replaced him with a generative “AI” chatbot. Then they offered to keep him on at a reduced rate to edit the synthetic drivel. “How can I compete with that as a human being who needs much more money and much more time?” he asked in the first video, what became a telling meme for our times and a sad crystallization of 2025’s creative economy.
The thing about that is:
The most dangerous thing about “AI” in the creative industries isn't whether synthetic media generators truly replace human creativity — they can’t. The most dangerous thing is that it seems “good enough” to some bosses and clients who control creative budgets and ironically don't really care about good creative work.
It’s why I recently dubbed this as the “age of AI-sterity,” a silly word that means austerity but now with “AI!” As I wrote recently in the first Hype Ball column: “While tech leaders spin grandiose visions of artificial general intelligence saving or destroying the world, their current impacts cut straight to people's livelihoods.”
Where things get interesting:
As Wei's story rippled across social media, OpenAI launched Operator, its first so-called “AI agent” meant to handle computer tasks on your behalf. Early reviews reveal a $200/month tool that can't even handle asking for a delivery address. In Platformer's testing, Casey Newton found himself in a “surreal exchange” explaining to a computer how to use a computer — watching it try to deliver groceries to a Des Moines address when he lives in San Francisco. But despite Operator’s many limitations, it’s getting a lot of LinkedInfluencers horny for the “AI agent” era. That’s just the latest in the “AI-sterity” discourse.
At this point, most of the writers, designers, artists, photographers, filmmakers and other creatives in my network have tired of the LinkedInfluencer “AI” grift, with takes like: “‘AI will create more jobs than it destroys’ or it's ‘augmenting creativity, not replacing it’ — as if watching your industry's entry-level jobs evaporate is somehow canceled out by the promise of becoming a prompt engineer.”
The pattern should feel familiar by now, as I wrote in this ESC KEY .CO long read: “It's now commonplace for startups, who previously might've had budgets for freelance writers to generate much of their SEO blog content directly through the chatbot. Do they still have people in charge of the blog on staff? Sure, but in too many cases, they've become prompt engineers and fact-checkers for a chatbot.”
And that's exactly what happened to Wei. But here's where it gets darker: In a follow-up video addressing his meme status, Wei noted he'd be fine thanks to other revenue streams. Then he spotted “AI”-generated summaries appearing under his YouTube videos, potentially slashing his watch time metrics by “20-25 percent,” he said. The same technology that took his writing gig was now undermining his video revenue. It's a preview of how “AI” tools cascade through creative economies — not by replacing human creativity outright, but by slowly eroding the financial scaffolding that makes it possible.
The thing to talk about over your next power lunch:
As creative workers watch their income streams erode from multiple directions, the question isn't whether to resist but how do we? There’s much we could learn from the Luddites, who history has misunderstood, according to author Brian Merchant — a topic he discussed in this episode of Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. Luddites opposed bosses using machines to replace skilled workers while degrading the quality of their craft. Sound familiar?
But what does meaningful resistance look like in 2025? As one writing instructor argued in Inside Higher Ed back in November, we need “a license to resist” — not just individual refusal but collective action. So ask your lunch companions: When tech leaders insist “AI” will “democratize creativity,” who exactly gains that power? And how do we build solidarity among creative workers when each platform and tool seems designed to isolate us into individual contractors competing for ever-shrinking budgets? The answers may determine whether human creativity becomes merely a luxury for those who can afford to work for next to nothing.
And one long thing to read:
This TL;DR Briefing includes analysis from this exclusive ESC KEY .CO long-read, which goes deeper into the topic:
JD Shadel
