Kevin Cantera had been at the same edtech company for 17 years when the AI wave hit. A researcher and historian by background, he wrote and curated educational content — the kind of careful, sourced material that takes time and expertise to get right.
When the company announced it was rolling out ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot for everyone, Cantera didn't resist. He dived in. "As a writer, AI was this incredible tool," he told the Washington Post. "I considered the LLM as a collaborator. I learned how to design high-quality prompts to get it to produce accurate, non-hallucinated information. And of course I'd manually review and rewrite everything to make sure the quality was there." His productivity, he said, "was off the charts" — more than doubling what he'd been able to produce before.
His direct manager reassured the team repeatedly: "Don't worry, AI is just an assistant. It won't replace anyone."
Cantera believed it. Why wouldn't he? He was the one making the tool work better. He was the one catching its mistakes. He was the subject-matter expert guiding the AI toward better output. If anything, he thought, he'd become more valuable — the human in the loop that made AI work.
Then the layoffs came.
Cantera was among dozens of content employees cut in a single round. The company didn't say explicitly that AI was replacing them — it never does — but the math was obvious. A team that had needed dozens of researchers and writers now needed far fewer, because each remaining person, armed with AI, could supposedly cover more ground. The tool Cantera had learned to master so well was the same tool that made his position expendable.
The irony isn't lost on him. "I am sure they try to vet what they get from AI, but I also know that they let go of a good number of subject-matter experts," he said. "It is absolutely terrifying to think they could be relying on the model's output without any quality assurance or true subject-matter expert review."
Seventeen years of institutional knowledge, of building curricula and refining content and knowing the material inside and out — replaced by a prompt box and a subscription fee. Cantera's story isn't unusual anymore. What makes it sting is that he didn't fight the technology. He embraced it. He made it work better for his employer. And his reward was showing up one day and finding out his services were no longer required.