Workers Paid $5 an Hour to AI-Ghostwrite Executives' LinkedIn Posts on AI Taking Their Jobs

CEBU CITY, Philippines—A growing offshore industry employing Filipino virtual assistants at four to seven dollars per hour is producing AI-assisted LinkedIn content for North American and Australian executives, an investigation published this week found — with the single most requested content category being the executives' personal reflections on how artificial intelligence is reshaping labor markets and threatening to displace workers worldwide.

The assistants, who use ChatGPT and Google Gemini to produce between 30 and 40 posts and comments per day, coordinate via WhatsApp groups organized by U.S. and Canadian agencies that sell the service to clients as "authentic executive thought leadership."

One assistant, who asked not to be identified, said her most frequently requested format is a first-person account of the moral obligation to protect human workers from automation, which she said takes approximately four minutes to generate at her current volume.

"My client has strong feelings," she said. "I make them faster."

Agencies say the model saves clients up to 80 percent on labor costs compared with hiring a North American ghostwriter, with no measurable reduction in engagement metrics or in the apparent sincerity of the concerns expressed.

At least three of the highest-volume assistants surveyed said they worried their own positions would eventually be automated.

"Last quarter we ghostwrote twelve posts about the moral obligation to invest in the human workforce," said a Manila-based agency owner. "This quarter those same clients are asking us to automate more of the workflow. So things are going well."