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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

#71

Post by owebmaster »

joshka wrote: post #67
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…

Context went from 8,192 tokens on GPT 4 to 1M tokens currently with zero improvement. The latest models got even worse.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#72

Post by djoldman »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #7
curuinor wrote: 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.

Presumably they mean HFT / "locals" / "sell side."

These folks compete in a reasonably zero-sum game.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#73

Post by rbr94 »

> ... and model checkers can instantly catch errors.

Lol. If that were true software would've been a lot better historically... Model checkers don't scale to 90% of the software we write. Typically you have to 1) heavily abstract the program and 2) put it in some sort of harness to specify how you want to model the outside world (which will always fall short of practice). And probably 10 other workarounds since most model checkers are Research Grade Software™. Not saying they're not tremendously useful, but that bullet doesn't hold up at all.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#74

Post by falcor84 »

shagie wrote: post #30
mikelitoris wrote: post #8

Safest job from AI is also the oldest job.

Machine sex and other stories by Candas Jane Dorsey - https://archive.org/details/machinesexothers0000dors/page/76...

If we're doing book recommendations, I quite recommend the essays in https://academic.oup.com/mit-press-scholarship-online/book/1... and particularly the philosophical discussion there of whether "robot sex" is an oxymoron, as a robot almost by definition cannot dissent, so it might only be "robot-assisted masturbation"

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#75

Post by glimshe »

david-gpu wrote: post #60
shahar2k wrote: post #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.

> generative art is blindingly obvious.... To me Have you tested this systematically, or is it possible that you are experiencing survivorship bias? If there were any generative art pieces that you didn't notice, you would have thought that they were human-made. Therefore, all the pieces you identified were "obvious" to you. Not to mention false positives.

I imagine that they haven't done a peer-reviewed scientific study of their ability to notice generative art.

We can replace their statement by "I'm a visual artist and at generative art is often blindingly obvious.... To me....". In other words, they can notice some or most generative art but other people familiar with art can't, or at least can't as often as they do. I think what they are trying to say isn't too changed by that.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#76

Post by AndrewDucker »

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…

Futures are zero sum, but can also be a win for both sides, because what they gain is stability.

"I will buy y tons of corn from you in April for £x" - now I don't have to worry about how much my corn will cost and you don't have to worry about what your income will be.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#77

Post by shagie »

falcor84 wrote: post #74
shagie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine sex and other stories by Candas Jane Dorsey - https://archive.org/details/machinesexothers0000dors/page/76...

If we're doing book recommendations, I quite recommend the essays in https://academic.oup.com/mit-press-scholarship-online/book/1... and particularly the philosophical discussion there of whether "robot sex" is an oxymoron, as a robot almost by definition cannot dissent, so it might only be "robot-assisted masturbation"

For any wondering, that book is also available on internet archive.

https://archive.org/details/robotsexsocialet0000unse

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#78

Post by jedberg »

spijdar wrote: post #52
dakolli wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM prose has degraded with each model update, the models are now being RL'd into wall of texts that only makes sense to other agents. I think its going to become more obvious as we move forward that is llm generated because labs seem to only be focused on tool-calling/agentic-coding environments, as that's the only thing that drives revenue. There may come players who focus on models that are good at writing for tec…

Yeah, this tracks with my experiments. About every 6 months or so for the past year-and-a-half I've tried using the "frontier" LLMs to as-near-as-possible autonomously write novel length stories, because I find it fascinating. When I had Gemini 2.5 write a novel, it wasn't really objectively "good" by any stretch of the imagination, but while the prose was very purple and full of cliches and, well, bad writing I gues…

I'm curious if you've tried Claude. Subjectively, I've always preferred Claude's writing over ChatGPT and Gemini.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#79

Post by joshka »

owebmaster wrote: post #71
joshka wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Context went from 8,192 tokens on GPT 4 to 1M tokens currently with zero improvement. The latest models got even worse.

Size of context is not the entire story here, it's ability to properly feed and index the context that's needed on this sort of thing. E.g. your entire slack/discord/email/github/jira/zoom meeting/coffee chat ... history is the context that you bring to the table on this sort of thing. Most of this is unindexed. Much of this will not be in the future.

> The latest models got even worse.

Which models? This is one of those things that likely has both model and domain specific aspects that impact your experience. In my experience with OpenaAI models predominantly (I previously worked there), they've improved significantly over the last 6-12 months. My experience with Claude is worse, but I haven't spent as much time getting into a mechanical sympathy there. They're still not perfect though and I have many steering docs that help avoid the biggest problems in the models I use when generating docs.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#80

Post by gonzalohm »

greenowl wrote: post #40
gonzalohm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know of a few software engineers who have stopped using AI beyond using it selectively as a search / troubleshooting / stack overflow replacement. If you are taking steps to protect your brain maybe in a way you are also protecting your job? Who knows how this all turns out years from now.

I am one of those engineers. I just don't want to be dependent on it. I want to still do the work and learn how to be a better programmer
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