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

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261–270 of 331 posts

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

#261

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…

You don't own ChatGPT output -- you can't legally sell it to others.

You also, by the services terms of use, have to source when something is partially or fully written by ChatGPT.

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

#262

Adapt or die. Not actually, of course. We need a social safety net that lets people adapt without fear of starvation/homelessness/etc. But all of this bitching about "oh no, things are changing" just comes across as "oh no, this newfangled horseless carriage threatens my livelihood as a buggy whip manufacturer". Posts like this just make my eyes roll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492730 We're headed towards…

The following quote was written in 1930, in the New York Times: "Some day no one will have to work more than two days a week... The human being can consume so much and no more. When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure." Given the…

I read somewhere that we modern people DO have much more leisure time -- we just decide to take it all in a block at the end of our lives.

(In other words, instead of retiring at 65 and dying at 68, like someone might have in 1930, we're more likely to retire at 65 and die at 78.)

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until that jobs is yours, because not everyone is an AI scientist/developer. Prepare for social unrest.

Where I live, at lest in a medium-sized town in the US, there's a huge amount of work in hospitality, construction, skilled trades, healthcare, and every other field you can imagine. The only commonality is that none of those careers include "making content" or "social media". It's like at some point during the COVID pandemic people forgot that everyone can't sit at a computer.

“It’s fine if it happens to someone else”

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

#264
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.

It's not going to go away, though. If anything, the future looks like lower quality and higher quantity. The usefulness of ChatGPT's (and its successors') answers also depend on their inputs. In the limit, if there were no humans producing new material, there would also be nothing new that ChatGPT version N could tell you.

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

#265

As a writer myself, if you can be replaced by AI, you should be. If you're capable of independent insightful thinking and writing, you won't be replaced.

"First AI had replaced SEO writers and I didn't care because I wasn't a SEO writer. Next AI had replaced journalists and I didn't care because I wasn't a journalist. Then AI had replaced my job and there was nobody left who would help me."

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

#266

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 fo…

> we'll be settling for more, worse-quality content

which is hilarious because one of the main use cases I want to use LLMs for is "hey, call your web-fetch plugin, scan this page, summarize it".

topic -> LLM hydrates it -> user -> passes it to LLM, asking to condense it

kind of funny

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

#267
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…

>But a lot of output is very much winner-take-all: music, movies, TV. If you look at the state of current movies and TV shows, ChatGPT could do a much better job than today's writers. Heck, some high school kids could do a better job.

Or maybe movies and TV shows are expertly targeted at someone who isn't you?

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

#268

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.

It's not going to go away, though. If anything, the future looks like lower quality and higher quantity. The usefulness of ChatGPT's (and its successors') answers also depend on their inputs. In the limit, if there were no humans producing new material, there would also be nothing new that ChatGPT version N could tell you.

Something something 100 monkeys with a typewriter? I'm expecting some margin of error introduced into these models that produces a surreal fever dream era of AI generated content on the internet.

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

#269
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

> So you can just as easily turn the analogy around and say people are the "cheap but worse" option.

No, because this is a factual question with a factual answer. You need to actually know which is more dangerous.

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

Because humans and AI are different? We are much better at predicting when humans will be wrong than with AI, for one.

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

#270
post #250

To a large degree this disruption is taking place in america. The payment for programmers/ content makers etc was so overvalued because the US market is so hot. The rest of world not so much

are developers overvalued? or the rest of people undervalued? Like look at house prices, food prices, everything is much more expensive but wages are not adapted for this
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