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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

#91
post #81

>he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. So is this like SEO content marketing? Without understanding the nature of the job, it's hard to know what conclusions to draw. If the most important part of the job was just "write something that will end up on the first page of Google search results", than I can totally believe ChatGPT can replace that. If it's something where the m…

OP can look forward to some well-deserved schadenfreude when the marketer's clients inevitably replace him with AI.

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

#92
post #81

>he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. So is this like SEO content marketing? Without understanding the nature of the job, it's hard to know what conclusions to draw. If the most important part of the job was just "write something that will end up on the first page of Google search results", than I can totally believe ChatGPT can replace that. If it's something where the m…

But what about Google penalizing generated content? It's an incredibly bold assumption to assume that this can continue. It's so thin and poor quality.

All assumptions are bold right now, so in a weird way they kind of cancel each other out lol. There's really no predicting what this is all going to look like in 1-3 years.

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

#93
post #81

>he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. So is this like SEO content marketing? Without understanding the nature of the job, it's hard to know what conclusions to draw. If the most important part of the job was just "write something that will end up on the first page of Google search results", than I can totally believe ChatGPT can replace that. If it's something where the m…

But what about Google penalizing generated content? It's an incredibly bold assumption to assume that this can continue. It's so thin and poor quality.

I'd be curious to know how good of a job Google can do at recognizing content generated by ChatGPT. While I've seen some tools that claim to detect AI-written text, their performance is usually pretty lackluster. Even if they have an internal model which can distinguish ChatGPT-authored content reliably, it seems like it'd be prohibitively expensive to run at scale (on the assumption that it must be a pretty large model to reliably solve a difficult classification problem).

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

#94

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.

Creative output from GPT-4 like everything else is a huge jump from 3.5. People say 60% as good but don't be surprised if it's already much closer or even surpassing the human baseline in question.

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

#95

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.

What if a flight only cost a nickel, but there was a 40% chance it blew up? Not all errors are equal. Sometimes 99% as good isn't even close to good enough. But, yes, for most things 60% for 1/100th the price, is going to cut it.

> What if a flight only cost a nickel, but there was a 40% chance it blew up?

Everything has failure modes though so this isn't nearly as easy of a comparison...

Just as an example on the analogy, there are plenty of cases of pilot suicide bringing down planes too that one would expect would never happen with pure automation... So you can just as easily turn the analogy around and say people are the "cheap but worse" option.

FWIW, we have been able to create processes to manage risks with unpredictable humans, why couldn't we with AI ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#96
post #65

> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin. A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change. Only time will tell. A thousand different outcomes are possible: the downstream client is upset by the r…

As horrified as I am for people whose jobs will be lost (including mine, quite possibly), "content" is such a plague on humanity I'm glad it will soon be devalued into the ground. Moutains of useless tweets and blog posts will be rendered meaningless when ChatGPT has all the answers. Dust to dust.

I both strongly agree (“content is a plague”) and strongly disagree (artisans, even digital ones, make society better).

I’m glad that we’ll hopefully see the end of content as an industry, where people churn out text and images and posts trying to monetize attention by the penny. It’s inevitable as content becomes effectively free. How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creators? I’m pretty sure medium can be replaced in entirety today.

That said, there’s plenty of people who work hard and are immensely talented and contribute a lot to society. Technology and automation has slowly taken away many jobs that brought people satisfaction and we’re anything but BS jobs. My classic example is musicians. It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).

I don’t have the answers, but I hope that automation can start replacing BS jobs through AI.

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

#97
post #73

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.

This is already the bargain with intellectual property. What if you can get writing 50% as good as Stephen King? Doesn't matter, because the winner takes all and books are infinitely copyable. What if you can run a 400m in 80% of the world record time? Doesn't matter, because you'll only be paid a pittance. What if copilot can write code with only 50% more bugs than an engineer? Doesn't matter if each bug costs an av…

Stephen King is a weird example because there are lots of working writers in the store brand Stephen King market.

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

#98
post #65

> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin. A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change. Only time will tell. A thousand different outcomes are possible: the downstream client is upset by the r…

Creative writing output from GPT-4 like everything else is a huge jump from 3.5(and it gets even better with targeted refinement). People say 60% as good or whatever but don't be too surprised if it's already much closer or even surpassing the human baseline in question.

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

#99
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what happens to the wages of plumbers and electricians when 200 million people start retraining to be them?

Good thing they are already a regulated job (in much of the US) so it’ll be easy to gatekeep access.

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

#100
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what happens to the wages of plumbers and electricians when 200 million people start retraining to be them?

200 million people aren't going to want to deal with excrement filled pipes, bug, rat, snake infested crawl spaces, understand all the dangers involed and all the other reasons that plumbers and electricians have such high pay scales.
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