An editorial expert on the future of editing jobs in the age of AI

Samantha Enslen owns and leads a content marketing team at Dragonfly Editorial.

In a Grammar Girl podcast episode, she said she candidly tells clients when to use AI instead of hiring her team. When asked how AI might shrink her business, she admitted not knowing.

Her uncertainty is so relatable.

Again, the honest answer is "I don't know." Yes, it could be that two years from, five years from now, our agency is 20% smaller because that's how work has changed. And you know that's what the market will bear. What I'm gambling on slash hoping is that it's the opposite. We will be freed up from some of the more mundane tasks so our staff has more time to focus on higher value things—writing, substantive editing, project management, proposal management, strategizing, creating... not just sitting and writing a blog but what's the whole content strategy, marketing and communication strategy that the company has for the whole year?

I track discussions about AI's impact on jobs, but I've grown skeptical of absolute predictions. Maybe what we need are more narratives like those in Studs Terkel's Working, honest accounts of how people feel about what they do.