I had to look back through a saved DM on Twitter from early to mid November 2022 to remember when this happened. It has been a long time.
This was my first, and maybe only, real foray into freelance writing. It also ended with me getting fired from freelance writing.
At the time, I was mostly tinkering. I was either working on a content site or messing around with a dropshipping store called Heat Rejuvenate. That was the general phase I was in.
I had an online friend through Discord and Twitter. Months earlier, probably around August or September, I had mentioned to him that I was interested in doing some kind of online work if he ever came across anything. He had been doing some writing himself.
In November, he reached back out and said the guy he was working for had some writing work available. He mentioned right away that these were quick articles. Around 800 words for about $20 an article. He also said he usually only spent somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour writing them.
That part always stuck with me.
I never knew if he meant just the writing itself or the research too. Because if you were given a topic you already knew well, maybe that timeline made sense. But some of the topics I was assigned were things I knew absolutely nothing about.
One example was an article about VoIP systems, basically phone systems. I had no background in it at all. If I actually researched the topic properly and then wrote an 800 or 1,000 word article, my effective hourly rate would have been terrible. Probably closer to five dollars an hour.
The idea that someone could spend 30 minutes to an hour on something like that honestly blew my mind.
Around that same time, AI writing tools were already starting to gain traction. People were using tools like Jasper, and I had access to one called Closers Copy. It was never stated anywhere that AI tools were not allowed. That was never part of the conversation.
I did a test article, submitted it, and the guy was happy with it. After that, I was given more work. I think it was somewhere between five and seven articles. I completed them, sent them in, and got paid.
Everything seemed fine.
Then I got an email from the guy running the agency. He said they ran my articles through AI detection tools and that the results went off the charts. The message was clear. They believed I had used AI, and they were no longer interested in working with me.
That was it.
I messaged the friend who had connected me to the work and apologized, worried that I might have put him in a bad position. He told me not to worry about it and said it didn’t affect him at all.
What I found interesting about that whole situation is the timing. This was mid November 2022. AI writing tools already existed, but ChatGPT itself was released to the public just a few weeks later, at the end of November.
Fast forward to now, January 2026, and AI-assisted writing is basically the standard. People use it everywhere, and the expectation is that humans edit and shape the output.
At the time, though, it was treated like a hard line.
I also forgot to mention that before any of this, I had joined Location Rebel and taken their course on freelance writing. I was actively trying to learn the ins and outs of building a freelance writing business, not just randomly stumbling into it.
In the end, this was my short-lived experience with freelance writing. I did create a small freelance writing website afterward and wrote a few articles for it, but I never really pursued it seriously. That site doesn’t exist anymore, although I could recreate it if I wanted to.
As far as I know, one or two of the articles I wrote were actually published and are still out there somewhere.
I don’t think I’ve done any other paid writing since then.
What stuck with me more than anything was how quickly that door closed, and how early AI had already started reshaping expectations around writing. It quietly pushed me away from chasing freelance writing gigs and toward building my own things instead.
In a way, that experience ended one path and nudged me toward everything that came after.
