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It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

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Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#41

Post by Gigachad »

chii wrote: post #30
mjr00 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. 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.

Every single store sells coke or Pepsi. Supermarkets might have a range of off brand which some taste good and some don’t. But Coke doesn’t cost that much, I’m not going to learn a bunch of new brand with spotty availability to work out which one tastes good to save 30 cent.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#42

Post by _huayra_ »

TheRealWatson wrote: post #29
pulvinar wrote: post #17

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.

They could. Just don't expect the same pay when the assistant is performing a big chunk of the work. Same goes for engineers. Just wait.

When my neighbor's job gets taken away by ChatGPT, it's a recession. When mine does, it's a downright depression!

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#43

Post by Gigachad »

brailsafe wrote: post #13
rainytuesday wrote: post #4

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.

I don't think I'd accept anything worse than McDonald's if they paid me to eat it.

McDonald’s already is that product. It costs 1/4th as much as a restaurant burger. And half the time it’s just as good.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#44

Post by globalreset »

Isn't a better approach to starting using ChatGPT, charge per amount of stuff produced instead of time at attractive rate and focus on tweaking the output to be better than just plain ChatGPT? Unless the writing yourself part is so important to you.

Once ChatGTP starts producing good enough code, I'm going to start focusing on efficiently driving it to increase my overall productivity, and not give up on programming altogether.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#45

Post by lumost »

pulvinar wrote: post #17

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.

Presumably, you work in a challenging area of software which has not yet been remotely threatened by "low-code/no-code" tools or outsourcing. Consider simple CSS editing/webadmin work where a business user currently has to wait ~1-6 weeks for a change and pay 1-4k for an expert to change the color on a page. Now imagine what will happen when ChatGPT can get it right ~90% of the time with the right prompts from a business user.

Considering that GPT-5 will be out in another 1.5 to 2 years, with 6 out in ~4-5 years. Consider how far we are from autonomous coding assistants for high end development work. Consider how tooling could be made to speed up AI based development.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#46

Post by mistercow »

pulvinar wrote: post #17

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.

Well, right now, a manager can’t just write a vague description of what they want into a text field and get back working software twenty seconds later that they can deploy by clicking a button. That may change in the coming years, but the situation right now is that you need a human developer for any nontrivial production use case.

That’s not the situation for copywriters. Marketing copy doesn’t have an objective threshold where it either works or doesn’t, and AI can easily take “here are some points to cover, give me three paragraphs” and spit out something that won’t be embarrassing to paste into an ad.

In short, the difference is that AI can’t do our whole job yet, but there are some writing jobs where it basically can.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#47

Post by celeritascelery »

TheRealWatson wrote: post #29
pulvinar wrote: post #17

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.

They could. Just don't expect the same pay when the assistant is performing a big chunk of the work. Same goes for engineers. Just wait.

I see no reason to think that their pay will not increase. They can now produce 2-10x the amount of content. Did compilers decrease engineers pay because they performed a large portion of the work compared to writing assembly?

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#48

Post by ramesh31 »

likeabbas wrote: post #27
ramesh31 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not equate "frontend" with "trivial". Huge mistake.

It's just an example. There's plenty of backend "engineers" who don't really engineer anything. 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 fr…

100%. The vast majority of folks labelled as an "engineer" these days couldn't integrate x^2.

But software is a different beast than bridges or power lines. It takes a creative streak that goes beyond that. And math is not the great filter in the same way it is for those disciplines. I don't think credentialism is the answer. But perhaps something more along the lines of trade licensing.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#49

Post by Gigachad »

irdc wrote: post #25
pulvinar wrote: post #17

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.

But at some point a human will add so little value that they're not worth the price.

We can only hope that when this day comes, we end up with fully automated gay space communism.

But the reality will probably be that plumbers and builders become the next tech bros telling us to learn tiling. Just go with the flow I guess. If tech becomes automated, move to the next thing.

Re: It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

#50

Post by TechnicolorByte »

no_wizard wrote: post #37
chii wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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.

I would also argue, that they in fact, do not taste the same, even in double blind tests I’ve conducted in this area for college

Even Pepsi and Coca-Cola have obvious differences with many preferring the latter. Store-brand cola is an even bigger difference.
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