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The safest job from AI may be writing
81–90 of 221 posts
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#82There may well be some writing jobs that are safe for the reasons given in this post, but that doesn't help all the writers I know who have already lost their jobs and are struggling to find work. It's not enough that humans can tell the difference and feel an ick, there also need to be enough organizations willing to pay money for that difference. From my vantage point, there are not. It turns out that for a ton of…
I have worked in the publishing industry, translation and editing (got out to a more dependable career just in time), and what is astonishing is how even "load-bearing" text is not safe from the cost-cutting pressures. That is, even some respectable publishers for the last several years will publish a book one is expected to pay good money for, with minimal editing and proofreading compared to the old days, and if it is an originally foreign book, with machine translation and minimal post-editing.
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#83Has writing ever been a safe job, even before AI?
If you are Steven King, sure. From what I heard it's a bloodbath at the bottom.
It's a pretty reliable career for hundreds if not thousands of mid-list authors who generally stick to genre fiction. It's entirely possible that AI could core out the middle of the pack as well as the bottom, which would threaten not just jobs but a wealth of institutional knowledge that those authors share among their peers and especially new up-and-comers.
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#84The 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.
Even if it’s obvious to some at this time, as time passes artificially generated writing will become mainstream and what becomes the normal writing style. If you read IX century literature, it reads differently, the vocab is different, the sentences are built differently. It was totally normal back then. It’s not normal now. In ten years the new artificial style will become commonplace and accepted -I mean unless we artificially always make it deviate.
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#85I 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.
There's a lot of writing that is meant to be read by humans.
Code's ultimate goal, on the other hand, is to be run by computers.
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#86Yeah I had GPT5.6 Sol act as an editor on my new chapter and it did find decent issues with PoV and narrative distance but it was so bad at prose. The best way I can describe it is, it was too clean. Often times humans write about things unsaid and left for reader to interpret or deliberate awkward sentences to tease character psychology. The AI just straight up corrects these without second thought. This will likely…
> This will likely be the case with general purpose models unless we see some genre specific fine tunes.
Are we at the point in the hype cycle to go "there's a skill for that" yet?
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is more or less what Ray Dalio was getting at with The Changing World Order, IMO.
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#88Even safer jobs might be the ones don't get automated because nobody really cares about, e.g. fishing lobster on a boat
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#89Has writing ever been a safe job, even before AI?
If you're good at it, which extremely few people are. It's my belief that not enough good writing exists for the tech companies to train an LLM. At least not a generally applicable on.
Tech companies are training off the shadow libraries, which have the bulk of English-language human writing in book form from the twentieth century, and that traditionally published stuff with an ISBN usually got a proper editor of some kind. So, it is hard to believe LLM companies don't have enough material; it's not as if they are limited to low-quality stuff on the web.
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#90I have a feeling the author framed this the wrong way.
my take is - the author wanted to express that there's always a demand for human prose / writing that captures the subtleties of expression, thought & ideas. which is very true. & we can already see this e.g by people opting out of LinkedIn for it's A.I driven long posts. whereas engagement is high on X where posts are likely to be human generated.
I wouldn't say writing as a job is protected - as corporations will always take shortcuts.