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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

#121
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?

At some point, "wages" don't make sense. We're not there yet, but LLMs have given us a taste of it.

Instead of worrying about bullshit metrics from times gone by, let's ask questions like "what happens to the happiness of plumbers and electricians when they realize that they too can relax and let the machines take care of the grunt work?"

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

#122

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 fucking hope so.

Can you imagine if you had time for all of your side projects because all of the bullshit you (presumably) have to do now for money was automated away? I cannot understand warning people "oh no, can you imagine not having to waste your life doing bullshit for other people?"

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

#123

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.

If a team of five people with five "assistants" does the things that previously took a team of ten people, that means that five of these people got replaced by automation.

Oh no, 5 people will be freed from the shackles of a bullshit job, the horror.

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 med…

> How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creator?

I can tell you don't use TikTok and don't understand how quickly the trends adapt and depend on human understanding of hyper niche cultural trends.

Nothing about GPT indicates it can engage in this without heavy human interference.

At most it'd at least depend on being able to replicate human generated videos on prompt (which it's far from doing without horror show uncanny valley but sure... one day eventually in the indefinite future, which is the least interesting problem) let alone all the niche cultural stuff... and critically reputation signals already strongly required. Humans are deeply intwined in all of these, with automation playing a marginal optimisation role not anything near replacement.

Cheap imitations will remain a novelty for a long time. Just like how deepfakes and GPT news articles were oversold as a serious problem in the near term but haven't borne out beyond niche failures and journalist FUD posting.

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

#125

I wrote about this same exact thing (on a throwaway so my other employees don't see this) from the perspective of the employer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484643 ---- I'm writing on a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I run a mid sized software company that does a mix of software consulting and saas. Quite common these days. I want to share a real story about how chatgpt eliminated a marketing job. I…

This is a good thing. One more bullshit job eliminated that only exists to make the numbers go up. This will be hard, but as a society, we need to examine the entire reasoning behind "jobs" and why "more jobs = more gooder". The entire foundation of that line of thought is fundamentally flawed.

If a job makes the "numbers" (by that I assume you mean revenue or profit) go up, then by definition, it's not a bullshit job, it's a productivity enhancer.

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

#126
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 writes faster than ChatGPT can.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a team of five people with five "assistants" does the things that previously took a team of ten people, that means that five of these people got replaced by automation.

Oh no, 5 people will be freed from the shackles of a bullshit job, the horror.

I agree bs jobs suck if they had other options to feed themselves, but today we live in shitty capitalism and instead people might just have to live in cars and eat scraps from the trash.

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need to find better burger places if McDonalds is just as good half the time.

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

#129

So much content marketing is already churned out by contractors with zero domain knowledge. This doesn't surprise me much. It's sad to see humans lose their jobs to automation. But (without knowing much about the details) if the company thinks they can automate what this person was doing with AI, it was kind of a bullshit job [1] to begin with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

I recently was asked to provide input on a piece that our company wants to publish. I'm not in marketing, but normally write code and such.

The copywriter doesn't understand most of our business, so it's a lot of work on my end to explain it at their level (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but the worst is that I then have to help them iterate over the story, which takes so much time and effort from me. I might as well write it myself. Or just ask ChatGPT. Which I did. It wrote a fine story with a lot less bullshit and perfectly understandable for business people.

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

#130

I wrote about this same exact thing (on a throwaway so my other employees don't see this) from the perspective of the employer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484643 ---- I'm writing on a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I run a mid sized software company that does a mix of software consulting and saas. Quite common these days. I want to share a real story about how chatgpt eliminated a marketing job. I…

This is a good thing. One more bullshit job eliminated that only exists to make the numbers go up. This will be hard, but as a society, we need to examine the entire reasoning behind "jobs" and why "more jobs = more gooder". The entire foundation of that line of thought is fundamentally flawed.

Until that jobs is yours, because not everyone is an AI scientist/developer.

Prepare for social unrest.

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