Artificial intelligence has not only improved productivity; it has outright eliminated jobs we thought were safe.
On RMC, several workers agreed to share how their work collapsed almost overnight. Writers, graphic designers, translators: creative and textual content professions are among the first affected, but they won’t be the only ones.
At Yiaho, we are naturally at the forefront of these issues. We have been working on artificial intelligence for years and aim to democratize it. But it is essential to support workers to ensure a successful technological transition.
“ChatGPT is faster”: The Shock of a Freelance Writer
A freelance writer, accustomed to working for agencies and companies, perfectly remembers the moment everything changed.
“I didn’t see it coming; everything stopped in 2023. A client clearly told me, ‘I use ChatGPT because it’s faster.'”
Thousands of freelancers have heard this kind of phrase over the past two years. The human hourly rate can no longer compete with low-cost, immediate text generation.
“We thought AI would help us, not replace us”
Sylvain, a former employee of Onclusive (formerly Argus de la presse), a company that provided customized press reviews to hundreds of businesses and communities every morning, describes a mass layoff experienced as a technological betrayal.
“We thought AI would help us, not replace us.” In a few months, dozens of positions for monitors, writers, and summarizers disappeared.
Entire Professions in the Crosshairs
Today, writers and translators are suffering. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of graphic designers (Midjourney, DALL-E, Adobe Firefly, our online AI image generator), video editors (Runway, Descript, CapCut AI), sound engineers, and even music composers (Suno, Udio, AIVA).
The digital sector is shifting towards automated production, where humans are merely correctors, or even simple validators. Beyond safeguards and regulatory constraints, at Yiaho, we are convinced that AI must be a true tool to serve workers, not a means to replace them.
It can be noted that despite the best prompt in the world and powerful AI, only human intervention can validate the generation of text or an image. Humans remain and will remain indispensable.
A Positive Employment Balance… or an Irremediable Divide?
The classic argument is that every technological revolution destroys jobs but creates new ones. AI is already generating positions for prompt engineers, AI ethicists, trainers, fine-tuning specialists, and content verification specialists.
A major unknown remains: will the volume and quality of these new jobs be enough to absorb the millions of displaced people? Historians remind us that previous revolutions took decades to rebalance. This time, the pace is infinitely faster.
Also read on this topic: Will AI Replace Artists?
Behind the Technological Feat, Lives Turned Upside Down
The testimonies heard on RMC are not isolated cases: they are symptoms of a historic shift. Artificial intelligence is no longer a tool; it is a direct competitor that takes no holidays, no coffee breaks, and no salary.
Faced with this acceleration, society must quickly invent cushioning mechanisms: massive training, transition income, ethical regulation, and sharing of the value created by AI. Without this, the promise of a more efficient world could turn into a nightmare for millions of replaced workers. At Yiaho, we are aware of this and are ready to best support this beautiful technological transition, which we must view as a valuable aid for the future.
Source: RMC
