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The safest job from AI may be writing

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

101–110 of 221 posts

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#101
Go on to Ao3 and a popular fandom, say like A Song of Ice and Fire: 9 out of 10 fanfictions written in the past two years stink to high heavens of AI. 9 out of 10. From some that are obvious AI to even normies, to some that slip one or two ai tropes after a couple of chapters, because the author got lazy and stopped editing carefully.

It's sad, infuriating, discouraging. A deluge of slop drowning the last embers of authentic human creativity.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#102
post #79

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…

Claude writing quality got unbelievably bad with Opus 4.7, with no improvement in Fable. Opus 4.6 was fine. Im starting to see it as a security risk - my brain just can't process its word vomit, so just tell it to go on, implement whatever

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#103
post #95

If I found the best human writer in the world, and had him write every article on the internet, wiping his memory between each one, his writing would start to get pretty noticeable and boring!

I agree. LLMs write really well, but probably too consistently in terms of style. That said, I did recently ask AI to do an editing pass over some writing I did, and I was surprised that it missed a tense mismatch that I had (not within a sentence, but within a paragraph).

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#105
post #27

The safest jobs are the ones that can't be done behind a screen. I'm a technician and there's no robot that could replace me and there won't be for a long time.

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

You can't make 1000+ trash robots just to produce one that works okay sometimes and somehow make the economics work from that, so I very much doubt it.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#106

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…

I also believe this. Post-training LLMs with vague metrics can only be achieved with RLHF, which is not impossible, but extremely costly and difficult. Instead, companies will opt for RLVR, focusing on math and programming tasks. This pushes objectives away from writing quality; often far away. That is why older models, in my view, actually read better than newer ones. It's by design.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will always be creative superstars.

Of course. But they're going to be machines. I don't think there's magic that makes the human brain impossible to automate. And engineering is going to lead to faster improvements than evolution could.

lol yeah sure. AI sucks and always will.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#109
First, I actually had the author of this post as my distributed systems professor back in college. He's not just a super smart dude on a technical level, but he's probably the only CS professor I've ever had who seems to appreciate writing in itself (which may be evident from his blog). I think the combination of these two qualities puts him in a good spot to make the claims he is.

In terms of what he's presenting here, I'll say this: his line of logic highlighting the "dual-mind problem" of writing seems, to me, like the most compelling aspect of this argument. When I write something (especially to a specific audience, including an individual), I must practice cognitive empathy if I want what I write to be consumed properly and effectively. This is a cold way of putting it, but even in text message responses which span a few words towards family or a friend, I can put quite a bit of thought into how it will be received, how they will read it, interpret it, etc. My cadence in just texting, alone, can shift dramatically from one message to a next based on who I'm sending it to, what I'm trying to convey, etc.

All of that is fine and not hard to understand, but I suppose the interesting part is this: when I'm just trying to get information across (i.e., instructions, directions, etc.), my messages will resemble something written by an AI. It's not enjoyable to consume, but that's not the point. But as soon as I want to add a bit of "fun" to a message, the task I'm performing is completely different. It's no longer just an exchange of information, but it's an attempt to invoke specific feelings, visualizations, memories, etc., in the other person/people.

I do have a hard time imagining what it will take for AIs to be able to do THAT effectively. I think they're fine at conveying information, but I think people are already becoming very aware that conveying information, in itself, is not enough to be effective. These LLMs don't "care" to "entertain" you with what they're writing at you about. They're just spitting out the mathematically derived facts with, seemingly, no meaningful ability to invoke deeper thoughts in their audiences' minds. And that might not seem particularly important outside the context of writing fiction, etc., but I think it's actually pretty critical even in "dry" settings, like explaining code, because the thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc., invoked through reading IS the output of reading (even if it doesn't seem that way).

Perhaps AI will be able to do this more effectively if they're trained on direct brain signals or something. Like, train the AI not just to convey accurate information, but also encourage it to do so in a way which stimulates different areas of the brain with different intensities based on the premise that, doing so, is actually what people are getting out of that text.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#110
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.

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.

I highly disagree. Code is still meant to be and still is read more by humans.
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