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Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

simonwillison.net

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Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#31

Post by AndrewKemendo »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #24

The problem isn't getting rid if people's jobs. Jobs are not inherently valuable. The problem is we have not built a society or economy where everyone can thrive regardless of their employment.

The only thing that seems hopeful is that people are finally talking about it at mass scale.

I promise you as an anarchist agitator that is unbelievably new just even in the last couple years and precisely what usually happens prior to actual direct action.

My fellow anarchists hate the fact that Donald Trump did more for anarchist-socialist praxis than every other socialist writer in history.

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#34

Post by Mistletoe »

moltar wrote: post #7

I think the article is about “copywriters” who aren’t true copywriters but those who were writing junk articles for SEO. Once AI can write proper compelling converting copy then I’ll change my mind.

How do you know you aren’t reading it every day?

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#35

Post by mvkel »

I can't help but wonder if this is a bit like a few years ago when comedians were complaining that nobody was laughing at their jokes anymore. They realized that it was a mandate to figure out how to be funny again, because what was considered "funny" had changed.

In this instance, and probably most instances of art/craft, copywriters need to figure out what is creative again, because what is considered "creative" has changed.

I could also see this being the journey that AI customer support took, where all staff were laid off and customers were punted to an AI agent, but then the shortcomings of AI were realized and the humans were reintroduced (albeit to a lesser degree). I suspect the pendulum will swing back to AI as the memory problems are resolved though.

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#36

Post by simonw »

_zagj wrote: post #32
bsndjdkd wrote: post #13

[flagged]

I can't think of a more insufferable AI cheerleader. I wish I could hide all submissions of his blogposts, as well as his comments. (Note that I flag neither.)

Anything I could do to be less insufferable?

(Odd to see a complaint about me being an "AI cheerleader" attached to a post about the negative impact of AI on copywriting and how I think that sucks.)

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#37

Post by morkalork »

rfarley04 wrote: post #2

I'm a full time copywriter for SaaS companies and I'm actually finding the opposite. My experience is people are having AI write stuff then trying to massage it themselves. When they can't get it to a point where they're happy with it they eventually just throw up their hands and hire me for pre-AI project scopes with 2025 rates. Not saying that's the experience everywhere, but AI has been much less problematic for m…

I suspect that for every case like yours, there's dozens of companies of lower quality where the AI slop is "good enough"

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#38

Post by dangus »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #24

The problem isn't getting rid if people's jobs. Jobs are not inherently valuable. The problem is we have not built a society or economy where everyone can thrive regardless of their employment.

In addition, abrupt changes in industry landscape are problematic.

The expectation for everyone to retrain and do something else is not necessarily reasonable, especially in an environment that does not have much of a social support system for education, training, and extended periods away from the workforce.

And we all know that the market doesn't magically make replacement jobs better or the same as the previous ones.

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#39

Post by _zagj »

simonw wrote: post #15
bsndjdkd wrote: post #13

[flagged]

This is a bit of an odd post to attach that comment to, but here you go: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures

Besides the fact that you do have conflicts of interest (disclosing them doesn't negate them), you don't seem to understand that given how all of the Big AI players have shown themselves to be ruthless and shamelessly dishonest (hoovering up people's creative work without concern for its licensing, aggressively scraping websites to the point of DDOSing them, disregarding robots.txt and using residential IPs to disguise their traffic, and all the while denying everything), that when you assume the role of their most enthusiastic shill, people will naturally start to doubt your integrity.

EDIT: To put it another way, I remember a talk where you dismissed people's concerns about their data being used for training after AI was integrated into a product, citing the company's (a big AI player) denial--as if that should just be taken at face value, because they says so--a perspective that many of us view as naive or disingenuous.

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#40

Post by simonw »

_zagj wrote: post #39
simonw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of an odd post to attach that comment to, but here you go: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures

Besides the fact that you do have conflicts of interest (disclosing them doesn't negate them), you don't seem to understand that given how all of the Big AI players have shown themselves to be ruthless and shamelessly dishonest (hoovering up people's creative work without concern for its licensing, aggressively scraping websites to the point of DDOSing them, disregarding robots.txt and using residential IPs to disgui…

The purpose of disclosure is to allow people to make their own decisions about how trustworthy I am as a source of information.

If I started rejecting access to early models over a desire to avoid conflicts of interest my coverage would be less useful to people. I think most of my regular readers understand that.

I was responsible for one of the first widely read reports on the ethics of model training back in 2022 when I collaborated with Andy Baio to cover Stable Diffusion's unlicensed training data: https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-...

Calling me "their most enthusiastic shill" is not justified. Have you seen what's out there on LinkedIn/Twitter etc?

The reason I show up on Hacker News so often is that I'm clearly not their most enthusiastic shill.

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