Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The safest job from AI may be writing

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 222 posts

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#91

Post by lexandstuff »

dzonga wrote: post #90

I 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…

To the contrary: Twitter has the lowest content engagement rates out of any of the networks.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#93

Post by JamesBarney »

djoldman wrote: post #72
phyzix5761 wrote: post #7

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.

Presumably they mean HFT / "locals" / "sell side." These folks compete in a reasonably zero-sum game.

They're market makers who provide liquidity. So it's not exactly zero-sum.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#94

Post by 99954bb63ccc »

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.

It extends well beyond creative stuff too. It makes me think of Gell-Man amnesia [1].

People can tell when something they are experts in is being done poorly, but others can't, and it frustrates the experts. Then, those same people think something completely different is being done well despite what experts in that respective field say. It's like when someone from your family reads an article about your profession and then proceeds to tell you how your job works. lol

It's a really pervasive issue in society IMO. And a few prompts in someone's favorite LLM just reinforces it to people that don't know (any better|what they don't know).

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#96

Post by sandworm101 »

lexandstuff wrote: post #91
dzonga wrote: post #90

I 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…

To the contrary: Twitter has the lowest content engagement rates out of any of the networks.

For now. And that is because humans are the only customers engaging with content. As agentic AI takes hold and is given credit card authority, bots will will engage. Bots will read the posts of other bots and use those when making purchase decisions for thier humans. If we are lucky, the bots will develop thier own twitter-specific language and we humans can finally wave goodbye to tweets as a concept. The bots will play the twitter game for us.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#97

Post by [deleted] »

joshka wrote: post #79
owebmaster wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

[deleted]

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#98

Post by famouswaffles »

swatcoder wrote: post #33
enraged_camel wrote: post #9

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…

No, they use "the same cadence and cliches" because they inflate a short and ambiguous prompt into long and specific prose by making statistical assumptions about what best fills in the gaps. It's not a training problem, it's an information theory problem, and it's not really surmountable. Any given model will always have some distinct implicit voice that its biased towards for that infill content, and so a popular m…

No. Reinforcement Learning is doing a lot here. Anyone who played with these models before the Davinci intstruct-tuning (completion) era can tell you the same. In some ways, SOTA models have gotten better at writing, but the neuroticism of instruct-tuning has still not been resolved.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#99

Post by debugnik »

TFNA wrote: post #82
muvlon wrote: post #50

There 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…

I've got some heavy reader friends and they keep complaining that many of Spains's fantasy book translations are ridiculously bad and blatantly machine translated now: Senseless terms that require looking up the original to understand, e.g. "fall" translated as in falling when it meant autumn; proper nouns, including character names, sometimes translated sometimes not; and many sentences that mix up the grammatical gender because the machine wasn't given enough context to infer it.

But these publishers don't get punished because they keep licensing popular foreign franchises, which aren't quite fungible, so consumers don't want to miss out and thus don't vote with their wallets.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#100

Post by slopinthebag »

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…

its not about dumping more and more info into the context, its about the intention. whats not in the context is just as important as what is. and i dont see how that can be automated.

also were seeing models become worse at writing as they get smarter.

Post reply on HN