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The safest job from AI may be writing

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

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Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#61

Post by jiraiyasarutobi »

vips7L wrote: post #46
docheinestages wrote: post #35

I don't think writing is an "AI-complete" problem. It's just that the models are inefficient at it right now, due to training and/or architecture. Good writing requires thinking, reflection, and doing multiple passes. This currently translates to using a high reasoning effort and burning lots of tokens, but big AI labs like Anthropic are struggling with handling the load, so they're doing the exact opposite and findi…

> Good writing requires thinking, reflection, and doing multiple passes Same with code, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.

That's because it's cheaper to automate than pay a software engineer. The economics has to make sense. Writing is tricky. Prose quality isn't there yet for many genres. You can tell AI written prose apart. Maybe it won't matter. Maybe there is demand for it even. Or Maybe we will create genre specific finetunes if there is enough demand for it.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#62

Post by Ekaros »

quickthrowman wrote: post #24
curuinor wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Derivatives (options, futures, swaps, etc) are a zero sum market, there is always a winner and a loser necessarily because the contracts have an expiration date. The same is not true for trading equities, they are not zero sum. There are dividends, buybacks, companies will sometimes spin off a part or parts as separate companies that you get newly issued shares of stock from (GE splitting into parts is a recent examp…

The market has been heavily engineered and gamed to be positive sum. But sometimes I wonder could it turn out to be negative sum on certain timescales. That is that overall money would be lost on markets.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#64

Post by Ekaros »

f311a wrote: post #41
ilaksh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ChatGPT moment for humanoid robotics is coming within a year or two.

Robotics cost way more to produce and support, unlike software

And physical damage is lot more expensive to repair in vast majority of use cases. Have fun when your humanoid window washing robot punches through your window. Or any other such cases.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#65

Post by vips7L »

jiraiyasarutobi wrote: post #61
vips7L wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good writing requires thinking, reflection, and doing multiple passes Same with code, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.

That's because it's cheaper to automate than pay a software engineer. The economics has to make sense. Writing is tricky. Prose quality isn't there yet for many genres. You can tell AI written prose apart. Maybe it won't matter. Maybe there is demand for it even. Or Maybe we will create genre specific finetunes if there is enough demand for it.

> That's because it's cheaper to automate than pay a software engineer

For now. It also seems like we're still paying software engineers.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#66

Post by grebc »

unleaded wrote: post #59

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 wro…

One of the biggest lessons in life to learn is there are no shortcuts.

Doesn’t stop people trying.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#67

Post by joshka »

unleaded wrote: post #59

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 wro…

> It can't magically know what you want to say

I think for this argument to be true, the axiom that supports it is that the models have just as much context as they will ever have, and you cannot see being able to give them more / enough to be able to understand your perspective. That feels unlikely to be a position that doesn't change. As a society we're giving more and more context each day to this, and that makes this a valid opinion now, but one that erodes over time.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#69

Post by RajT88 »

I recently have been trying out frontier models on writing. Just for laughs, to bring an idea I have into the world acting more as director than author. I have a multi agent setup and am getting different models to argue about rating the story for clarity and whether the plot is complete.

I agree with the article. Even the frontier models call out that all the characters tend to sound the same. It also started at some point making huge changes to the core premise, and also adding characters willy nilly. The issues it called out with the plot (the ones it actually consulted me on) also made me realize how terrible of a writer I actually am.

Overall, it has been an interesting experience. I look forward to reading my own book!

I understand a lot better now why people are bemoaning KDP being filled with absolute garbage AI slop.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#70

Post by lazarus01 »

I was thinking about this yesterday, while going through some slop documentation generated by deepseek. If you compare claude fable 5, side by side with the deepseek, the differences in prose are glaring. It's not even close. Deepseek prose reads like fragmented shorthand, where claude fable 5 comes fairly close to human, certainly not superior to human quality writing.

I watched a podcast with a cognitive scientist and one of main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity, Lera Boroditsky.

She said something to the effect that, "in this very moment, we are speaking in ways that were never spoken before. We are saying things that no other person has said before...."

Language models are not sample efficient and cannot adapt to evolving language, unless it's documented in large amounts of examples.

So whatever isn't documented, whatever isn't in the training dataset or the rag corpus, the model will always be incredibly different in expression from humans.

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