How the world’s last UX writer got hired
A short story of one small act of rebellion in a perfect world
1
A faint humming wakes her up. By now, it’s almost second nature — waking up to these silent noises.
Scratch that — it is second nature.
She walks up to her once prized battlestation. The decor around the anti-blue-light screens reminds her of a more personal time.
Action figures, mementos. A dimly lit toy of a cat in a space suit. A green samurai with a bandana and three swords. A goth Hello Kitty collectable. A signed copy of a book.
This used to be her work-from-home setup. The place where she’d come up with her best ideas. And her worst ideas.
Where she’d binge a new show instead of writing.
And then she’d do all her tasks at 3 AM in a mad rush of productivity.
She loved it. She loved that she meticulously and randomly designed this corner of her room to be hers. Completely and uniquely hers. Her own space. In her own measure.
But now it’s the space of ‘it’. ‘It’ being the advanced UX writing software that her agency purchased a few years ago.
2
The exponential growth of A.I. at the beginning of the 2020s gave way to an exciting and flourishing few years.
LinkedIn posts became the new portfolios.
‘A.I. artists’ were popping up everywhere, each one ‘out-smarting’ the next, with increasingly realistic and ridiculous pieces. Reinterpreting historical facts. Reimagining futures. All from a Discord chat and a little bit of Adobe Photoshop.
‘Scary good’ A.I. scripts jokingly being shared in Twitter threads became best-sellers. And then became movie scripts.
In a decade — the process of creativity changed. It shifted tectonically at break-neck speed.
And we couldn’t adapt in time.
What was once a fun marketing tactic became the standard.
A.I.-based challenges added fuel to the fire of innovation. Exponential innovation.
We watched in awe as developers let machines run wild online, farming our amazement into becoming so close to us, blurring the lines of our own sensibilities, that it became impossible to tell apart what we had created from what ‘they’ had created.
‘They’ started winning awards. Prestigious awards. Faceless, nameless software was writing the most heart-wrenching, gut-punching stories we’d ever read. The most unexpected plot twists, the most earned jump-scares. The most immersive worlds we’d ever seen.
3
It’s 10 AM — and she needs to get ready for the 10:30 AM agency-wide stand-up call.
She has never seen her coworkers without A.I. filters on.
She still puts on make-up and does her hair, though — even if she knows the image her coworkers receive won’t be of her. There’s something vestigial about this, almost pointless. But she does it anyway.
A moderator opens up the call and asks how the night went.
One by one, perfect faces give a stutter-less report. No mistakes. No ‘uhms’ or ‘ahhs’. Impeccable pace.
It’s her turn — she speaks, and the words translate before her eyes. She sees little flags alongside the perfect faces. Her Russian coworker nods and her Chinese colleague seems to be writing down something.
She slips in a pun in her native Arabic — something that would make another native speaker react, smirk even.
Nothing. No reaction. Everything is fluid, fluent and clinical.
The report reads:
“99.998% ACCURACY.
USER EXPERIENCE WORKSTREAM — BANK PROJECT
Prompt copies have been reduced by 30%. This leads to a 12% reduction in wait times for the user assistant.
AI-to-AI flow remains unbroken.
Allowance for 900 additional daily transactions liberated.
End of report.”
She has no idea what any of this means. She gets a message in the little window next to her camera feed.
“Superb job, Leila. Keep it up.”
That’s not even her name. It’s close, but she second-guessed herself when she applied for this job. Maybe autofill made a mistake. A few letters off, and she would’ve corrected it — but she felt that it was somebody on the other end sending a message.
She kept the mistake. It made her feel human. It made her feel like her — even if it wasn’t her name.
4
When the first user experience general A.I. software was deployed, agencies and client teams around the world were overjoyed. The increments in productivity. The cost-saving in salaries. The reduction in office space.
This was going to change their whole world. And it did.
The ‘junior’ pool of talent was already shrinking — this about vapourised it out of existence.
Mid-weight and senior UX writers, designers, strategists and a few others desperately changed their titles to ‘A.I. Directors’, ‘A.I. Powered’ and ‘Fluent machine speaker’.
Fluent machine speaker.
Not English. Not Spanish. Not Hindi.
‘Machine’ speaker.
This meant that this person was able to ‘talk’ to A.I. software, and get results at the other end that were relatable enough to ‘feel’ like a human created it, but perfect enough to ‘know’ it was the result of a bunch of prompts.
For a few years, we saw a surge in positions. For a while, it was amazing — the writers felt like directors of their own teams, the designers felt like Creative Leads, and the strategists finally found people that understood them.
Until.
Until the first ‘client-side’ general A.I. software was launched.
And it wasn’t a human reviewing the content. The words. The artworks.
It was another machine.
This changed everything. We went from creating, to creating with A.I. support, to creating through A.I., to reviewing and approving through A.I.
This software gave feedback more quickly than the most motivated brand manager ever could, and understood brand guardianship to a degree that not even the founder could aspire to.
It got out of hand.
It was prompts reviewing other prompts, checking better prompts, and assuming our behaviours.
And they were right. They predicted all of our behaviours correctly. All of our incentives.
Specialist roles started vanishing. First slowly, then quickly.
Until we were left with only a few open positions, being published by the handful of agencies still around.
5
She got let go of her last freelance position a few months prior.
Her work was amazing, and she loved working with her team.
But their manager came in one day, head down, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“Team”
He started.
“The agency is moving in another direction. As you know, we were recently bought out by one of the ‘big four’, and we were expecting some changes. I’ll admit — not so quickly.”
He showed a few slides as it took him a few seconds to open his mouth. A few more for words to come out.
“This… uh… this is the software that the agency is acquiring the licence to. It’s very complex to explain — my A.I. Director explained it, but I’m still not quite sure of how it works. Basically — it writes better than us, designs more quickly, and never complains. So it’s just like us, but perfect!”
He knew the joke wouldn’t land. After all, this was his last day in the agency as well.
“Team, I’m… I’m sorry. I took a gamble. I thought our offer would be better, but we just couldn’t compete. This is not how I wanted it to end”
It was only half a year knowing this team, but she cried afterwards in her bedroom. The team was great, but that wasn’t what made her cry.
This was the last ‘normal’ job she’d have. She knew what was coming.
She was dreading it, and this job was her last hopeful chance. Like her friends and her previous coworkers, she’d have to cave.
She became an ‘A.I. Supervisor’. She’d become just like everyone else.
What this role entails, nobody was too sure about. She just unlocks her laptop, logs in with the fingerprint scanner, and off it goes.
It’s almost insulting how quickly it writes new and exciting copy.
It actually is insulting. Faster than she could ever be. More precise. Funnier. Wittier. Sadder.
Tomorrow she’d celebrate her one-year anniversary at the job. She had no idea where all of the work she was doing, or supervising, rather, went to.
She didn’t know who her clients were, or who her team was. She didn’t know if she was good at her job, or bad.
Her impostor syndrome went away.
She thought this would be a dream — getting a salary for just logging in. But everyone’s job is exactly the same. Everyone logs in and then logs out at night.
And in the background — it’s machines deciding everything.
6
As we got closer to the current year, it was clear that certain skills were not going to be valuable in the marketplace of ideas.
Even the developers that created and enhanced these software bundles were eventually ‘retired’ because their creations outpaced them.
This wasn’t a dystopia in the sense that machines wanted to kill us. It wasn’t anything as dramatic. It was a boring dystopia.
They just became better than us at sitting in front of a screen and scrolling through one.
World Cups still happened. The Olympic Games still happened. Life still happened.
Concerts, World Expos, blockbuster films, indie cinema… it all still existed.
We just weren’t creating any of it.
We were still being paid, we just didn’t know by whom, exactly.
There was still a sense of urgency in the world, though. That we were not doing everything right, and that we could still do better.
World governments were still negotiating with each other. Some wars were still being fought.
Some pandemics still had to be contained.
But it just felt like everyone was on autopilot.
In a weird twist — we had become automatons. Reading scripts written for us, wearing fashion designed for us, listening to music played for us.
It just didn’t come from our brains, not in the way everything had come from our brains for hundreds and thousands of years.
It came from a vague, nebulous fog of artificial intelligence that wasn’t malignant, and wasn’t homicidal.
It just was.
It just became the standard.
And we were too amazed at first to realise that we’d been plunged into this purposeless journey of lukewarm pride and moderate expectations.
Nothing was truly remarkable. About anyone. About anything.
It just was.
7
She’d spent 12 months at this job.
She’d never met her manager. She’d never met her coworkers.
‘Leila’ had gone to the office exactly once, to find three other people in it. She came in on the day of her one-year anniversary.
“Hi” — one of them welcomed her.
“Hey” — she could tell neither he nor they had been here before.
They were exploring the space. Everything looked like the most perfect Pinterest board. Nothing seemed precisely real.
“What are you guys working on?”
“Something for a video service, it’s like TikTok. I think”
“I’m not sure — I think it’s for a museum? Or real estate. I don’t get the content”
“A bank launch. Or campaign. Something ‘bank-y’. Feels ‘bank-y’” — she smirked at this.
A row of ‘aesthetic’ computer setups was effortlessly creating entire brands and events in the background. In minutes. It was overwhelming.
“Me too. Who is on your team?”
“Some Russian guy, some Chinese girl. I think there’s an Arab supervisor, I’m not sure” — she got excited at the thought of meeting her own team member.
“Really? I think it may be me. I’m ‘Leila’”
She remembered one of her first tasks was ‘reviewing talent’.
And for some reason — she manually misspelt this one candidate’s name, just as ‘something’ did to hers when she was applying for the job.
He faintly smiled at the reply.
“I’m ‘June’. Nice to meet you. Finally”
All four left the office after a few minutes.
Everyone just had all the time in the world now.
She felt solace in knowing that maybe, within a ‘bug’, laid her last act of rebellion.
In misspelling a UX writer’s job application just to make everything ‘not-as-perfect’.
And she hoped someone had done the same with hers when she applied.
One last semblance of ego in a boring, ideal, and prompt-based society.
With artificial intelligence whisperers, and machine speakers.
‘Leila’ once loved to write. And now, she just watches a screen do it for her.
An almost maniacal obsession with language and grammar got her the career she wanted.
Intentionally misspelling was, in a way, her path to some sense of purpose.
As silly as it sounds, that one act gave her hope for a more failed tomorrow. A more imperfect tomorrow. A messier tomorrow.
A more human tomorrow.
Epilogue
This story was not A.I. generated.
I wrote it because I pictured a scene in my head, that of a UX Writer in her room, reviewing A.I.-powered UX software’s work because it had gotten so good that her skills were rendered obsolete.
I have used A.I. software to create copy, artwork, posters, and content… and it’s still not great enough to be as good as us. Maybe it never will.
But it’s already jumped from 0 to 1. Or to 0.00001, but it’s no longer 0.
It’s a matter of iteration now.
At the beginning of this very odd, very interesting age of A.I. becoming more prevalent, I felt I wanted to write something that a chatbot would at least have a hard time writing.
I’m not a fatalist, and I’m hopeful for the future — but the obsession and bizarre admiration I see on my socials for these tools does give me pause.
LinkedIn is half “look at what I did with this software!” and half “we are recruiting for these jobs!” these days — or at least it seems like it to me.
And I think we are missing the point.
So, lest we succumb to the grey, boring and perfect dystopia I describe above — I’d like to see much more celebration of human talent.
Recruiters, tech companies, and fintech companies. Professional services providers.
Agencies, big and small.
All of us.
Let’s never stop hiring humans. Hiring human UX writers, UX designers, and UX strategists.
Because the time we stop designing as humans for humans, it’s the time some world like the one I paint may come into reality.
And it’s not going to be the end of the human race. It may be even ignorant and selfish to think of it as a worse future.
But I want UX to keep being human.
I want to keep writing, designing and creating for humans, as a human.
I hope it can always be that way.
