For 15 years, single mother Lisa made a living from content writing. She began writing straight out of college, freelanced for years, and eventually followed a path taken by many young Filipinos: joining a multinational in the country's booming outsourcing industry.
Lisa says she never felt the need to use artificial intelligence in her work. "I can say that I am able to do my job, I meet deadlines. In my opinion, there is no need for [AI]," she told the BBC.
Eight months into her latest role, and one month before the position was due to become permanent, she was made redundant.
In the months before, Lisa says a public relations agency had been tasked with producing AI-generated material that she and her colleagues were asked to edit. She says her skills were used to train the AI on the company writing style.
"I feel like I dug my own grave," she says. "We were the ones who trained the artificial intelligence that replaced us."
Lisa is one of several former outsourcing employees the BBC spoke to who asked to remain anonymous. They signed confidentiality agreements in return for severance pay, and fear that speaking publicly could hurt their chances of finding work in an industry which has a small network.
Mary, another former content writer whose name we've changed, says her employer encouraged the use of AI as a productivity tool. Instead of making her job easier, she says it created additional responsibilities. "We had to edit more, fact-check more because the data AI produced was inaccurate," she says. "Technically it was more work for us." Like Lisa, she was later made redundant.
The International Labour Organization estimates that 12.7 million Filipinos — more than one in four workers — are employed in occupations exposed to generative AI, the highest share in South East Asia. The outsourcing industry employs roughly 1.9 million people and generates $40 billion in revenues every year, accounting for about 10% of the Philippines' economy.