Replaced by AI: how often Redditors say it, and how many of those comments tell of a real replacement

How often do Redditors write that someone was replaced by AI?

On job-related subreddits, the phrase “replaced by AI” is fairly common, and it can be a warning about an entire field, a joke, or sometimes it can actually describe an actual job someone lost.

I wanted to see how often this phrase appears on Reddit, and if it’s used as a way to communicate that a job was already lost. To do this, I looked up all the comments on Reddit since the beginning of 2022 that contained the phrase exactly (or any of the three ways it was spelled: “replaced by an AI”, “replaced by A.I.”, and “replaced by artificial intelligence”). That gave me a sample of comments with the phrase, and then I had them labeled individually. Since word counts alone can’t separate whether someone is predicting their own future or lamenting an actual layoff, labeling is important here. Finally, I tracked how many times the phrase appeared each month, relative to the total number of comments in a given month (number of appearances per million comments).

At the beginning of 2022, the phrase was relatively rare, appearing about 0.57 times per million comments. But in December 2022, that rate quadrupled in just one month, and it never went back down to its previous level. In September 2026, the rate hit 12.3 per million.

The monthly rate wobbles so heavily that any one month could be misleading. Instead, I’ll compare the same nine-month period of every year.

The phrase is used 0.65 times per million comments in January through September 2022. In the same months of 2026, it’s 12.9, or about 20 times as often, and it’s still climbing. So far in 2026, it’s already a sixth higher than the same months of 2025.

The busiest stretch is in the spring, with April and May being the peak months; September is slower.

But those numbers don’t mean that there are twenty times as many people losing their jobs to artificial intelligence: they just mean that the terms have spread out further. What those terms actually mean is another question, which I’ll get to later.

Try itHow often any phrase, like "replaced by AI", comes up on Reddit, month by month since 2005: Historical search

Where is the phrase most common?

If you sort subreddits by how many matching comments they have, you mostly get a list of big subreddits. r/AskReddit has the most, but that's only 2.9% of all of them. Even the forty subreddits with the most matches hold only about a quarter of the total. The rest are spread across tens of thousands of smaller ones.

For this analysis, I used each subreddit’s own rate, number of comments containing a given phrase per million comments in the subreddit. I picked fifteen of the forty subreddits based on having the highest rate for the year 2026. I also chose to include three larger subreddits as points of comparison.

The job-seeking and career advice forums lead, alongside AI-related forums. The phrase appears once for every thousand comments on average in r/Layoffs in 2026. r/cscareerquestions, r/findapath, and r/careerguidance trail not far behind, while r/technology is the baseline at 285 phrases per million comments.

Try itWho writes in any subreddit, when to post there and what does well: Subreddits

How many of these comments describe a real replacement?

So I took a sample of 300 comments that matched my search, about 60 from each year. I coded them for secondhand retellings, predictions, questions, and jokes.

When you see this phrase quoted, it’s helpful to remember that its use has increased around twentyfold. However, I could find so few genuine replacement stories in each year that I couldn’t compare years against one another.

Is it a new phrase, or has it always been around?

I had assumed that this was a new phrase, but in fact it is older, with 140 uses in January 2022. It predates the later surge, by almost a year.

I also looked at variants on this theme, like “replaced with AI”, “replaced-by-AI”, “replaced by” followed by the name of a specific AI (like ChatGPT), or more general terms like robots and automation. On average, for every comment that used the exact phrase “replaced by AI”, I found 2.2 of these other phrases in 2022. But by 2026, I saw this ratio drop to 0.32, meaning that the exact wording had won out.

One thing that’s clear is that at least part of the rise is simply due to more people talking about AI.

That rise has also been checked for quirks in counting, as a robustness check.

Another question about the data? Let me know and I’ll check it for you next time.

What this data can't tell you

Method

Planned before looking, and found while analysing

Conflict of interest: KissMyPost makes Reddit research tools. Funding: none.

Corrections: contact me; each fix gets a dated note on this page.

Questions people ask

The data

• CSVComments by month from 2022 to 2026Comments containing 'replaced by AI' per million comments for each month from January 2022 to September 2026, with the base and 95% interval.
• CSVJanuary to September by yearAll comments, matching comments and the rate per million with 95% interval, January to September of 2022 to 2026.
• CSVThe 40 subreddits with the most matchesMatching comments in 2022 to 2026, share of all matches and the rate inside each subreddit, January to September of each year.
• CSVPosts by month from 2023 to 2026Posts containing 'replaced by AI' per million posts from August 2023, a lower bound because removed posts lose their text.
• PNGMain chart, 1600 × 1000The monthly chart on this page as an image.

Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24234391