Big Tech's AI shock troops came for us — are you next?

“I have terrible news, Josh. And I wanted you to know first,” said my friend and boss Jack Buckby on July 25.

Lancashire Hudson, the content creation agency he'd founded, had finally lost its battle with the bots.

There is no keeping your head down and working quietly as a conservative in media anymore. The left and its ever-more-powerful digital golem will find you and finish you.

Our cash-strapped clients had been increasingly turning to AI for the daily news, marketing, and other copy they needed for their ad-supported websites and newsletters. This writing wasn't nearly as effective, but it was far cheaper.

Overnight, Jack and I lost our jobs and our ability to pay our bills. Thirty talented, hard-working writers and editors in our company lost theirs, too.

The coming disruption

We often think of AI as a threat to manual labor or low-level service jobs, but the truth is it's got creatives like us squarely in its sights as well.

It's not as if we hadn't seen it coming. The immediate benefits of automating are all too clear, especially if a company is struggling. “AI is cheap, accessible, and easy," Jack tells me. "[Even if] it's not necessarily good."

That said, this quick fix could end up damaging the brand in the long run.

“it’s not the answer for businesses who want to maintain a good relationship with their audience and customers," says Jack.

"Ask yourself, when you pick up the phone to call a company and you’re greeted by a robot, how do you feel? If you were told that an article you read in a newspaper was generated by AI, would you feel compelled to read it still? No. The honest answer is 'no,' and if your audience and customers are humans, your content should be, too.”

It's this vision that kept Jack fighting — until the economic reality could no longer be denied.

A monster of their own making

While the whole media industry is feeling the pinch, companies out of step with dominant progressive views are particularly hard hit, many Lancashire Hudson clients among them.

“I’ve had clients’ websites completely destroyed by Google shutting off traffic from their news search engines for mildly criticizing the vaccine roll out. They didn’t post anything in opposition to the vaccine, but instead, opposition to the mandates — and it wasn’t even a view shared by most of the staff. It was a single op-ed. And the site was destroyed," says Jack.

This kind of Big Tech censorship is what finally did Lancashire Hudson in.

Jack has been through this before. If you’ve heard of him, it is probably because he was once the enfant terrible of the English far right.

As a young man from a working-class Northern English town, Jack fell in with an extreme crowd of angry, disaffected young men. They had reasons to be angry. What good-paying jobs were left had to be competed over with foreigners and “asylum seekers.” These young English men were told they were moral scum for being white, English, and blue collar.

That’s when Jack discovered the actual racism, anti-Semitism, and violence bubbling under the surface of his new “community.” As he grew up, he grew alarmed, and he pulled back into a more traditional conservative position.

This experience led him to a realization: It is the relentless social and economic punishment the left dishes out to conservatives and working people that is creating the “extremist far right” the left loves to hate. He tells the story in his book "Monster of Their Own Making."

Hiring the un-hirable

Jack built Lancashire Hudson specifically to offer work to people who have a hard time getting it.

His employees included Claire, a retired schoolteacher who lives in the Midwest and supplemented her small income with daily writing as she cares for her husband and disabled sister. And Denise, disabled and homebound but a quick and talented writer who can turn out perfect copy in 15 minutes. Her job with Jack was the first time in years that she made her own way instead of relying on benefits.

Jack has also reached out to those shut out from the job market for ideological reasons. Anton, for example, has a journalism degree but can’t find work in media because he’s been seen having conservative opinions in public. Patricia is a married mother with a new baby who relied on work at Lancashire Hudson after her English university pushed her out of a 10-year administrative role because she was not sufficiently woke-compliant.

Then there's me. At the end of 2022, I was pushed out of my 20-year career heading a consumer protection nonprofit when an internal coup branded me a racist, bigoted, misogynist transphobe for my personal, off-work political views. My job as editor with Lancashire Hudson kept me afloat.

The left's digital golem

In a way, losing these jobs is a second, indirect cancellation. There is no keeping your head down and working quietly as a conservative in media anymore. The left and its ever-more-powerful digital golem will find you and finish you. Take it from us.

We’re watching an entire industry eat itself alive. The problem is not only that humans are being pushed out of the field. If we think news is biased to the left now, how much worse will it get when we remember that AI models are being trained on the biased, leftist, partisan content that comes from traditional and legacy media?

As Jack puts it:

“When Google and Big Tech companies restrict visibility and traffic to businesses with which they do not agree, they destroy livelihoods. When they restrict advertising income, they say it’s OK to have one opinion but not OK to hold another. Ultimately, many businesses are being forced to make huge financial cuts just to stay alive, and in some instances, that means replacing workers with AI. The companies that toe the line might not have to. That’s not good for unifying the country, and it’s not good for our political discourse.”

We’re trying to retool and figure out a way to work again, but everyone is feeling blindly through this new world of increasing digital control and digitally created “content.”

I can’t tell you how to navigate this world because I’m learning as I go. But I hope you hear my warning: Your job, your career, is not safe, including all of you fellow “creatives." If you’re a conservative, your number is going to come up for cancellation quicker than others. Prepare yourself.

In the meantime, Jack and I are looking for those companies that want quality content produced, overseen, and quality-checked by real humans with real principles. All of us who care about excellence, truth, and accountability that works for a world of humans had better find each other soon.