Signal reads the industry from the press releases down. This column works the other way — what people are actually saying in the places where nobody is presenting slides.
The manuscripts were already being written by ChatGPT
A clinical research writer reports that first drafts on every PI’s team are now produced with ChatGPT, with senior authors and journal editors acting as the quality gate. Nobody announced this; it simply became routine while the industry was busy debating whether it should. The writer’s own conclusion is the one worth sitting with: the writing was never the hard part — getting the science and the clinical messaging right is what the machine still can’t do.
Half the juniors are gone and nobody raised a ticket
Biotech workers comparing notes on AI describe a team that has lost half its junior bioinformaticians, and a bench scientist with no coding skill who now runs analyses through an enterprise AI subscription instead of briefing the data team. This is adjacent to health communications, but the pattern is ours too: the specialist queue doesn’t get shorter, it gets skipped. The juniors aren’t being made redundant so much as quietly not replaced — which is how a pipeline problem hides until it’s a succession problem.
Restructured first, explained never: watching pharma redraw the writing org chart
A writer watches Associate Scientific Writer roles at Sanofi being restructured, hears of similar moves at BMS, and asks the forum whether AI, outsourcing or centralisation is the driver. Twenty upvotes, zero answers. The uncertainty is the story: the people whose roles are being redrawn genuinely cannot tell which force is redrawing them, and nobody above them is saying.
The web devs are saying it out loud. We should be too
Web developers — an adjacent craft that also turns expertise into deliverables — are now openly discussing AI producing over half their output while employers quietly reassess headcount. It is the same conversation health communications writers and medical editors are having privately, just without the privacy. There’s an argument that saying it out loud is the first step to negotiating it, rather than absorbing it one quiet restructure at a time.
That’s it from the floor. If you’re seeing something similar where you work, the comments are open.
— Ned
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