Live data from Hacker News

The safest job from AI may be writing

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

11–20 of 222 posts

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#12

The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at. So the author may be correct, but for a different reason: unless writing starts being very valuable as a profession, it's unlikely the labs will spend significant resources making their AI models…

What's interesting is that we still read AI's output and that's still the primary interface between a human and the AI. Implicitly that means that writing is important and I think we're already starting to see this with the complaints around how Claude "talks"

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#14

I think it's likely to be lawyers who are the safest. Lawyers are the ones primarily in charge of the government, and I think it's likely that as soon as they feel like the legal profession is threatened, they will pass laws making it illegal to use AI for legal issues. It's not all sunshine and roses (paralegals are probably hosed), but the lawyers seem like they'll do ok.

Eh, I think we're going to run into the same issues we're seeing in software. That is, junior and lower status positions (so SDETs in software, paralegals in law) are rapidly being downsized, and that's going to have a big issue in the future where there isn't the same talent funnel. And then in the future those that work their way up will basically be dependent on working with AI.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#16

I think it's likely to be lawyers who are the safest. Lawyers are the ones primarily in charge of the government, and I think it's likely that as soon as they feel like the legal profession is threatened, they will pass laws making it illegal to use AI for legal issues. It's not all sunshine and roses (paralegals are probably hosed), but the lawyers seem like they'll do ok.

If that was the logic then software engineers would stop using AI to "protect their jobs" but that hasn't been the case.

There will always be people that work against their own profession and colleagues for short term gains

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#17
post #2

Workaday copywriting is dead (was moribund, now has been shot in the head). Prestige literary writing is zero-sum and therefore eternal, in the same way that equities trading (not formation and not business-building) is zero-sum and therefore the actual success of LLM has not given anyone a signal advantage anywhere there, because everyone else has LLM too.

Equity trading is not zero sum. There are real businesses and assets behind the equities they represent that have actual value and produce actual money.

The business-building is not zero sum, but the trading is zero-sum, and the societal purpose of the thing is to provide liquidity

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equity trading is not zero sum. There are real businesses and assets behind the equities they represent that have actual value and produce actual money.

The business-building is not zero sum, but the trading is zero-sum, and the societal purpose of the thing is to provide liquidity

[deleted]

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#20
The real thing being said here is that the author can tell good writing from bad, and assumes everyone can... I'm a visual artist and at generative art is blindingly obvious.... To me.... But not to many folks around me! Including a few artists and art adjacent folks.
Post reply on HN