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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

#191

Post by galleywest200 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #96
QuiDortDine wrote: post #77

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…

> 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 am not sure I agree with this. The barrier to entry to selling your own music (streaming, youtube) is so low that we see more and more people giving it a shot. Maybe they are not professionnel with a title, but they are musicians. Sure, maybe there are less orchestra performers but there are far more (smaller) groups to choose from. Did they really disappear?

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

#193

Post by Cpoll »

abtinf wrote: 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…

Replace "AI" with "his cousin" and it's the same crappy outcome, but not a story.

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

#194

Post by qtzfz »

marcopicentini wrote: post #184

How does the client practically doing it? If I enter a prompt like “generate an article about X” I got a generic article that aggregate general knowledge. Nothing new. How do you suggest to do it ?

That's what you get anyway, no? If you google the name of a phone all you get is blog posts with a regurgitated list of specifications that are already available in the manufacturer's website, but padded to a dozen paragraphs so they can put more ads between them. What's the difference?

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

#195

Post by Philorandroid »

It's occurred to me lately that, even though they rarely produce anything better than "adequate", LLMs being leveraged as a cheaper alternative to human output means we'll be settling for more, worse-quality content. Economics aside, I loathe to think of the day that ChatGPT is used to describe food allergens, hazard warnings, voltage ratings, or any other quantitative analysis with potentially lethal implications for being wrongly-conveyed that are eventually overlooked because an LLM gets it right most of the time.

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

#196

Post by tinus_hn »

Cpoll wrote: post #193
abtinf wrote: 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…

Replace "AI" with "his cousin" and it's the same crappy outcome, but not a story.

It’s the same sentiment as being angry the printing press is robbing scribes of their job.

It just might be that technology advances and society no longer has the same need for your skill and you need to adapt.

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

#197

Post by jwie »

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.

Small objective differences create vast differences in outcomes. Those things where that isn't true have already been automated away or commodified so there's very little margin left anyway.

It might be true in a misleading sense that the AI {product} is some large fraction of a genuine {product}, but that doesn't mean anything because the value is contained in those differences above the AI produced baseline. The value floor, so to speak, is a lot higher, but the ceiling hasn't risen an inch.

Those that move down in quality to preserve margin will soon discover there's not a there there.

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

#198

Post by SanderNL »

ranguna wrote: post #143

So this person lost his job to an AI because it's way cheaper and slightly worse. Why not hire chatgpt yourself? Instead of resigning because of chatgpt, use it for your advantage. Instead of taking 10 clients, take 100 at 10x less your usual price. You literally have the cheapest and best sidekick money can buy. The industrial revolution ended a lot of jobs but also started new ones. Like inventing, managing and mai…

So 100 clients you have to bill and administer at $8/hr. You don't have to write it all out, but you do have to maintain all context of all your clients. Good luck at that volume.

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

#199

Post by SanderNL »

Havoc wrote: post #175

The part that spooks me is how badly everyone got predictions on what will fall wrong. Remember when creative anything was said to be safe? Stable diffusion. Remember when coding was safe? CoPilot. Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber The irony is that my own line of work (accounting) was top of the prediction charts and I have yet to see even a hint of AI so that too was ent…

Nothing you'll do will work because everybody will do it. I don't think the market will bear millions of carpenters and plumbers rushing in.

My guess is software and everything else will just explode. For now cheap bosses can use GPT, but again everybody is doing that so you will not be competitive in the long run. At some point, every little shop will produce feature-length movies, have amazon-level webshops and your phone will need 512GB of RAM to boot up its written-in-LLM OS. We will need armies of creatives to direct all this bs.

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

#200

Post by interfixus »

melvinmelih wrote: post #173

I also used to outsource copy writing for $70 per 500 words but last weekend I wrote a script and rewrote copy on 40,000 pages within half a day. It cost me $40 in total. This would have costed me 3 million dollars and months in human labor.

And you have reviewed those 40000 pages?
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