AI Killed My Job: Tech Workers (www.bloodinthemachine.com)

Tech workers at Google, TikTok, Dropbox and numerous startups have contributed anonymous testimonials to a project called “AI Killed My Job,” describing how management uses generative AI to justify layoffs, change roles, or erode job quality. Examples include TikTok replacing human training videos with AI‑generated voices and avatars for internal moderator training, and platforms increasingly relying on automated moderation that human reviewers used to adjudicate in grey areas. Executives’ public predictions that AI will eliminate large swaths of entry‑level white‑collar work frame these stories, but the project foregrounds the lived experience: hiring postings falling, teams reprioritized to AI products, and workers quietly displaced or expected to absorb extra workloads. The accounts surface concrete technical and organizational effects: a Google engineer reports rising code churn and newbie engineers accepting AI‑suggested code (pressing Tab) without deep review, while senior engineers have used AI to generate database schemas and deployed them with minimal vetting, spreading defects across systems. A former Dropbox staff engineer describes stability work cut in favor of new AI offerings, illustrating how strategic shifts—not sentient models—drive layoffs. Together these testimonies point to three risks for AI/ML: workforce deskilling, degraded software quality when AI outputs aren’t rigorously validated, and management choices that weaponize automation for cost cutting—issues requiring policy scrutiny, engineering best practices, and more worker-centered reporting.