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So the client paid almost double to keep better talent, just in case, without prompting, then suddenly didn't care about talent? Makes zero sense.
I mean yeah if you're making $80/hr writing marketing noise then your job was always insecure
This is the kind of attitude that makes many hate tech workers.
Which is to say, this isn't just something that AI could automate; this is a job that could have been outsourced to much-lower-paid human workers in (English-speaking) developing nations decades ago. There is no reason anybody should have been making $80/hr doing this job in the first place; there wasn't $80/hr of labor going on, nor was there a moat to doing the job that qualified only a rarified number of people that could then demand $80/hr.
Instead, the wage being paid was a path-dependent coincidence of how most companies see marketing as a profit-center, and therefore want to offer "incentive pay" for marketing jobs; and how these same companies happened to consider copywriting — really just marketing-adjacent — as a "marketing job." Coupled with the fact that any given company doesn't usually need very many copywriters, and so doesn't focus on what sort of per-headcount cost-optimizations would be needed to "scale" their copywriting.
If AI output is 60% as good as a person, but costs 1/1000th the price... what decision maker is going to justify paying 1000x more for 40% more quality? We're really in for it. What if there was a cheeseburger that was 50% as good as McDonalds but was only a nickel? That'd be real bad for the McD's share price.
Really depends on the type of output. For content marketing that most people are just going to skim over anyway (aka is just going to be used for blogspam/content farming, which is what it sounds like the linked writer was doing for this client), yes, it absolutely makes financial sense. But a lot of output is very much winner-take-all: music, movies, TV. Only the top 1%, for some definition of top, of that stuff is actually purchased in meaningful quantities. 60% of top quality of that is worth the same as 0%, which is nothing.
> What if there was a cheeseburger that was 50% as good as McDonalds but was only a nickel? That'd be real bad for the McD's share price.
Not so sure about this; you can look at, for example, generic store-brand colas, which taste exactly the same as Coke and Pepsi and are cheaper, yet Coke and Pepsi haven't collapsed after decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? I think the emphasis was on “marketing noise,” i.e. something no one wants or needs that is forced into peoples’ eyeballs against their will through paid advertising channels.
And what do all the so-called elites that work at FAANG do?
For coding I've been using it as an assistant, not a replacement. I don't see why writers couldn't do the same, and be more cost effective and produce higher quality output than either alone.
I mean yeah if you're making $80/hr writing marketing noise then your job was always insecure
$80/hr is a pretty decent salary full time, so if people are finding chatgpt a reasonable alternative salaried office work isn't far behind here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's plenty of "engineers" whose job is to update some trivial frontend code or similar that will be automated away. I think software engineer salaries are about to tank really quick.
Do not equate "frontend" with "trivial". Huge mistake.
This all leads back to a conversation one of my professors talked about. In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one. I think if we changed this, then we would be able to differentiate software engineers from simple developers and that would help engineers maintain their status above chatGPT for a while longer.
For coding I've been using it as an assistant, not a replacement. I don't see why writers couldn't do the same, and be more cost effective and produce higher quality output than either alone.
Same goes for engineers. Just wait.
If AI output is 60% as good as a person, but costs 1/1000th the price... what decision maker is going to justify paying 1000x more for 40% more quality? We're really in for it. What if there was a cheeseburger that was 50% as good as McDonalds but was only a nickel? That'd be real bad for the McD's share price.
> If AI output is 60% as good as a person, but costs 1/1000th the price... what decision maker is going to justify paying 1000x more for 40% more quality? We're really in for it. Really depends on the type of output. For content marketing that most people are just going to skim over anyway (aka is just going to be used for blogspam/content farming, which is what it sounds like the linked writer was doing for this cli…
which is because coke & pepsi uses massive advertising campaigns to ensure the brand is doing the heavy lifting. Coke is basically a marketing company that happens to sell a liquid drink.