The safest job from AI may be writing

Unless the model watermarks text, it will become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between human legalese and AI legalese. Especially if they make it illegal, that will create a strong incentive to find-tune to imitate human lawyers more convincingly.

I appreciate what this piece is trying to do directionally but it shares a logical flaw with lots of other pieces about AI and knowledge work. It assumes that in order to disrupt a particular field, AI needs to print serviceable work unassisted; that it's "vibe-shipping".

AI today is most effective when it's not vibing, but rather copiloting a skilled operator. I don't necessarily want my agent to build an entire system for me, even if it's ultimately the author of almost every line of code; I'm actively making decisions throughout. There's obviously a spectrum here but at most points on the spectrum the amount of assistance available is still a step change in the economics.

So too with writing.

The first rule of accelerating writing with AI is that you're not allowed to use a single word the AI suggests. Even if what the model comes up with is great, better than what you could have done, as soon as the AI suggests it it's poisoned. At least with current models, readers can detect LLM prose in the parts per trillion, and as soon as they do you've lost them.

The second rule of writing with AI is that AI encouragement is toxic. A structural consequence of RL is that models are exquisitely tuned to generate responses that make their users perceive value. We recognize this in a gross sense in "sycophancy", but the problem recurs fractally in at finer-grained levels, where stuff like "this part is really strong" will subtly allow the model to set a course for your writing and you'll confidently ship crap.

With those two rules in mind, models are incredibly valuable for writing, more valuable in my experience than the professional copywriters I've worked with. The trick is to get them to make suggestions at a higher level than just writing alternatives:

* Do the sentences in these paragraphs end with the new idea or information?

* Are the real actors in each sentence the grammatical subjects?

* From paragraph to paragraph is there a clear flow of topics, or are things jumping around?

* Is this piece crudded up with metadiscourse like "it's important to note"?

I've had a stack of notecards for ages that I took down from Joseph Williams "Style: Towards Clarity And Grace", the most programmer-brained writing book ever written, I love it very much. For the past year or so I've been feeding them through GPT and Claude one by one, and it's drastically increased the speed at which I can knock out a completed piece.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that AI isn't going to have an impact on the writing profession. It's just not the most obvious impact everyone assumes it will have, where it, like, writes whole op-eds or whatever. At least not yet.

When a robot can figure out how to contort it's body to climb inside a machine to replace an encoder, I'll start to worry.

Mmm, I doubt it.

I have a weird background (product, development, writing + devrel). I write a lot of code and a lot of articles.

I think there is a lot of overlap in how people who write code or articles (documentation, books, etc.) use AI. On one side of the spectrum, you have people who just blindly input some prompt, accept the output and move on with their lives. You can likely predict how that is going for them (not great). On the other side of the spectrum, you have people who outright reject all AI and are continuing to plod on with how they have always done things.

In the center is a more reasonable approach that leverages AI to create without blindly accepting the output. This applies very much to writing.

The workflow that I've adopted over the past two years or so has been to leverage AI to help with the research and outline process. Once I'm happy with the structure I go and I write what I need to write.

This maps pretty closely to the code that I write. It's fine.

A lot of the replies are insisting AI will get better at writing with more development but I don't see it. Even if you have a mathematically perfect writing AI you still run into the same problems you would have if you handed off your writing task to someone on fiverr or something. It can't magically know what you want to say, it only has the information you gave it. A prompt complex enough where it won't get any wrong ideas has to contain as much information as the output would have.. so just write it.