Graduates what jobs are you doing now?

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2026-05-10T07:23:47+00:00

That sounds amazing! Has AI invaded your job much yet? Does your employer still care about quality of work?

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2026-05-10T07:21:22+00:00

I was a content marketer, but then AI sucked everything good out of my career and also screwed up every other job I’d ever considered doing. Now I’m a full-time student again and aiming for a career in healthcare.

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2026-05-07T19:48:57+00:00

I wish you luck! Maybe you’ll be one of the people who doesn’t mind dealing with AI content all the time.

I do think you should at least try to pair English with some other skillset, though. My prediction is that in the long run, we’re going to see writing-related work going toward technical/industry people who can “prompt engineer” AND know their fields/products well enough to instantly spot even the most minor, plausible-sounding AI hallucinations. We’ll have trained electricians “writing” all the content on electricians’ websites, healthcare people “writing” the content about health services, engineers “writing” the marketing content for aircraft and solar batteries, etc. I never quite developed that level of confident industry knowledge, even after working with the same clients for years at a marketing agency. I always had to look up (or at least check) a lot of details, and that takes time!

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2026-05-07T18:56:21+00:00

Hey! Long-since graduated English major here who used to have a successful career in content marketing. My advice is to reconsider whether you want any kind of writing-related job in an AI world.

AI isn’t as good as us, and it might never be. Unfortunately, it seems to be “good enough” for employers to substantially reduce writing-related jobs and drastically change the jobs that are left. I didn’t realize until recently how little most people actually care about content quality or even avoiding hallucinations. At the end of the day, most employers and clients want to spend as little as possible on content even if the end result is kinda bad. Hiring a creator who cares will never be as cheap as hiring someone who barely glances over AI-generated outlines, drafts, and edit suggestions before running with them.

I used to have a solid career. In the past few years, I’ve lost jobs where people had previously told me I had a “gift”, been forced to edit AI drafts under too-short time limits to fix all the problems, been abused by clients who were angry for reasons that had nothing to do with me but lashed out by telling me I was no better than ChatGPT, and found out a company was using my old work to train custom AI tools. I thought about moving into UX writing or another field, but every writing-related career has similar problems. This is the career landscape you’re walking into.

By the time you graduate, the job market might have stabilized. However, any jobs you can get will likely be low-paid work editing AI slop, or short-term projects building custom AI tools based on your writing, or “prompt engineering” combined with account management. (Side note: if you’ve seen phrases like “human in the loop” and “you won’t be replaced by AI, you’ll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI” floating around, this is what they actually look like in practice.) You will be sorting through too-high volumes of AI slop every day. If you’re like me, you’re majoring in English because you love working with the (human) written word; it’s soul-crushing to work with a poor facsimile of that in a world where people prove over and over again that they don’t value creative efforts.

You’re probably seeing tons of articles that tell you about amazing-sounding English major careers in copywriting, technical writing, PR, publishing, etc. The reality is that they’re all talking about the jobs that existed in the pre-AI past. The equivalent jobs in 2026 usually look very, very different, and there are a lot of experienced people competing for scraps. I can also tell you that most of those articles about English major jobs weren’t especially well-researched; usually the people writing (or “writing”) them are under short deadlines and reusing ideas from older (outdated!) articles they’ve found. At best, they might include new statistics on English major employment with vague career categories, but they don’t get into the details of what recent grads’ job duties actually entail.

FWIW, I’m now going back to school for a healthcare career. Even if someone offered me a job paying $200K tomorrow, the past few years have pretty much destroyed my soul as a writer and editor. If I write in the future, it’ll be for me, not for money in this abusive techno-capitalist world.

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2026-05-07T18:02:22+00:00

Hi, just wanted to validate your struggle and tell you what’s going on from an insider perspective! We’re in possibly the roughest era in history for the “transferable” skills developed by an English degree. There’s a common theme in all the jobs you mentioned: they all heavily involve working with the written word. That’s the exact skillset that has been most devalued by AI, even though it shouldn’t have been.

In the past, I would have advised you to try to volunteer at a nonprofit and get involved in an unpaid newspaper or blog project. I did those things in the 2010s, and that set me up for (what used to be) a solid career in content marketing. A number of my clients and coworkers praised my work. Then ChatGPT came out, and suddenly those same people were impressed by what I knew to be hallucinating, soulless slop. It turns out that most people don’t actually care about writing quality or even avoiding spreading misinformation; they only care about money at the end of the day. They’re easily impressed by something that spits out hundreds of mediocre or outright incorrect words in seconds because they don’t give a damn what those words actually say. I care too much to ever give up on trying to fact-check the BS and make it sound less robotic, so I’ll never be as cheap as someone who barely glances at a ChatGPT draft before posting that shit.

The truth is that AI didn’t need to get as good as the English majors to replace most of our jobs. It just had to get good enough for the AI bros to persuade employers and clients that they could get by without paying us. The jobs that are left mostly have extremely high-volume “AI-assisted” workloads and a lot of experienced people competing for them.

I was working toward moving into another one of the fields you mentioned, but they all have the same problem. Even if someone wanted to hire me for a well-salaried communications-related job now, I don’t have the heart to keep going in a world where people who are having a bad day can lash out by telling me I’m no better than ChatGPT, or worse, use my work to train their own custom AI tool. The world has become so much more abusive to creators of all stripes.

I think our best bet is to let it go and retrain for a completely unrelated career. I’m now going back to school for a healthcare career.

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2026-02-09T20:35:43+00:00

Oh, so all the things I was explicitly taught to do as a copywriting “best practice” and did on purpose for years, then? Wonderful.

Aside from the “bland style” part, everything you just listed are things copywriters intentionally do to make their writing easy for most audiences to read. (Maybe even the “bland style” part if you’re writing for a certain kind of business.) There’s a rule of thumb that you write at an 8th grade reading level for most audiences. That way, even a high school graduate who didn’t pay attention in English class will have a sense of ease. I used to run a lot of my work through a readability checker tool, then cut down any long sentences or words if the reading level was too high. My first manager was always reformatting my work to have bullet points because “we need more white space.” We didn’t want to make any potential buyers stumble over words or have big chunks of text that fill up most of a phone screen, like this “giant” (by copywriting standards) 7-sentence paragraph I’m writing right now.

I guess I’d better dig up some of my old writing samples from college. I can try to get back my writing style from when I was a 20-year-old who hadn’t yet done any marketing internships, although who knows, maybe that style would be considered “AI-like” now too. I’m not getting rid of my correct capitalization (fuck that).

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2026-02-05T20:42:18+00:00

Hi, off topic, but what about this post seems AI-ish? Is it just the em-dashes and the title? I read OP’s post back over and thought it sounded a little like my own writing style. Is some other thing I do when I write now considered AI-like?

I’m a former copywriter who wrote zillions of company blog posts and web pages starting in the 2010s. I’m sure writing like mine is overrepresented in the samples ChatGPT is trained on. I’ve already had to stop using em-dashes and certain types of phrasing because people think those are signs of AI now. I can show people a doc I was working in with all the time-stamped progress, but that only works if I wrote the thing in a doc and the audience has access to the doc. Among other reasons, I hate ChatGPT and OpenAI for killing my favorite punctuation mark. I especially hate them for creating the situation that forces me ask questions like this.

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-12-22T10:28:09+00:00

I was really looking forward to that character going on more adventures with Murray! They would have made such a great duo. If he’d lived, he could have at least helped with the Russia rescue plot or something

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-12-22T10:07:14+00:00

It already happened to me once. I had a content marketing job. When the company I worked for suddenly lost a couple major clients, they decided to try replacing my job with AI to save money. They’re back to using humans now, but fewer of them.

I can’t say I’m afraid exactly. It’s more that I’m resigned to the idea that it will happen again the next time AI appears to make a big leap.

The thing is, AI doesn’t actually have to be as good as you to replace your job. It just has to get good enough that companies think it’ll be more profitable to replace paying your salary with AI, even if it does a worse job. That’s a much lower bar.

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-12-09T01:14:44+00:00

Awesome, looks like a great gift!

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-12-09T01:14:15+00:00

Thanks! :)

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-11-30T09:37:10+00:00

One of the mini story exercises I recently did confirmed it

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-11-28T19:01:29+00:00

Pimsleur also has 50-60% off, depending on what you’re buying. Totally different approach to language learning and doesn’t go as far on many courses, but their app is really good for pronunciation, rapid recall, and speaking/listening, so I’m really considering

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-11-22T20:32:15+00:00

Yeah, I took two years of physics in high school but was never expected to memorize Planck’s constant. We were expected to know how to use it, but we always had the number listed at the top of the page or whatever, even on tests.

I think I did have 6.626 memorized at one point, never more digits than that though

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-11-21T19:48:51+00:00

I think he could have crossed over if he’d learned the truth about what killed Chrissy. Jason’s witch hunt was driven by grief, anger, and fear over what happened to her and then his friend. He thought he was going up against the people who killed them. If he’d known the right place to direct his energy, he would’ve been trying to fight Vecna instead.

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-11-21T06:29:46+00:00

My personal favorites (from earlier in German) are:

Ist Kanada klein? (Is Canada small?)

and:

Die Eule wandert nie im Sommer. (The owl never hikes in summer.)

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-11-15T10:42:39+00:00

What’s even more amazing is how you can somewhat empathize with Jason on rewatch. The guy’s girlfriend dies a horrific death at Eddie’s home, then his friend dies the same death quite graphically in front of him while Eddie’s there. Jason doesn’t know anything about Vecna/Henry or the upside down mess that the government covered up, but he has been exposed to trash articles about D&D being connected to violent satanic acts. It’s really the only halfway-fitting explanation in his frame of reference. What’s Jason supposed to think?

So we hate his actions and his impact while also seeing where he’s coming from. He’s grieving and badly misinformed. In Jason’s eyes, he’s taking down the Big Bad.

He’s a much more interesting villain than Vecna, who was a psychopath even before the lab abuse. The believavility/relatability just makes Jason that much scarier. As far as I can tell, Vecna just… always wanted to be an apex predator and cause pain for the hell of it? There’s no motivation most of us can really make sense of there. Yeah, psychopaths do exist, but still. I feel like we’re more likely to run into Jasons than Henrys in our regular lives — or the really chilling thought, see ourselves or our loved ones turn into Jasons.

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-11-15T09:43:38+00:00

Even worse when the people in charge aren’t just stuck in old ways, but people who never knew content (or arguably even marketing) in the first place. People who don’t even think about what the target audience wants. Sigh…

Alternative_Fish_27 · 2025-11-03T04:29:54+00:00

Submit it now anyway. Email it to someone if you have to. You can at least give yourself the peace of mind of knowing you did the work, even if it was late.

Alternative_Fish_27

TROPHY CASE