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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

#131

Post by deepwoods »

mrweasel wrote: post #34
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.

Copywriting struggles with the issue that businesses know they need it, but they don't value it. It's absolutely shocking to see how poorly companies, and governments, communicate and no amount of AI/LLM usage will change it. For decades it's been neglected and relegated to "cover my ass"- writing. The majority of AI deployment in businesses could have been avoided, if more attention had been placed on good communica…

I am not a writer but I do have to write a lot for work. The person who used to edit things for me has not been replaced, and I am expected to use AI. It is very good, but it's not all the way there. I am now left to decide whether to take the time to do it right or to go back to doing what I actually get paid to do. I wish my organization realized how important both sides of that decision tree are: we really ought to be careful about how readers perceive what we put out there, AND this isn't my job and we should have someone who's even better than me at this.

But this is an old trend with technological developments. Thanks to e-mail, most people handle much or all of their own correspondence. There used to be specialized staff for that. They were very good at it! But they were shown the door once they ceased to be strictly necessary, and now we all waste a bunch of time fiddling with Outlook instead of doing our actual work.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#132

Post by nicbou »

matherial wrote: post #120

I strongly disagree, for reasons that are different from what's discussed in the thread. It doesn't matter if LLMs can't hold a candle to some of the finest human writing. What matters is that before you become a world-renowned writer, you need to pay your bills, often for a long time. And that's what LLMs take away. All the mundane literature-adjacent works: journalism, translations, technical writing / corporate co…

AI overviews are killing traffic to websites that do the original research. It’s putting translators out of work.

The replacement is not better, but it’s good enough for the undiscerning people who prefer the cost pr convenience of LLM-generated content.

In any case, you find yourself competing with oligopolies that can insert their bad LLM output in front of your good work. It’s not a fair fight.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#133

Post by nicbou »

dragandj wrote: post #121
debugnik wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

They DO vote with their wallets, though. They're still buying that crap, don't they?

Sometimes the drop in sales is less than the cost savings

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#134

Post by fpoling »

pshirshov wrote: post #111

No. Below is my emotional opinion based on my own experience: Currently the models are totally helpless with plot and emotions. They make epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes. But: They are very good in finding _your_ epistemic, logistical and temporal mistakes. They are great as adversarial reviewers. They can validate grounding. They can test voices. They can build complex parallel reconstructions representi…

If it will be true, then we should have many superb books by new authors at this point. But we do not.

This is similar to observations that effect of AI on quality of apps in stores is mostly non-existent.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#136

Post by akoboldfrying »

People seem to have very short memories. LLMs are easily capable of good writing. The fact that they are loaded up with obvious "tells" now is quite a recent development.

One year ago, the writer Mark Lawrence posted an article [0] (featured on HN) describing how he generated 4 pieces of flash fiction with ChatGPT, asked 4 published authors (with a combined book sales of $15M) to also write a flash fiction piece, and then did a blind test asking respondents, for reach of the 8 pieces, (a) whether they thought it was written by a person or not and (b) an overall quality score. The result was that people (who were avid readers and skewed anti-AI) were no better than a coin toss at determining whether the piece was written by ChatGPT, and slightly preferred ChatGPT-written writing overall.

[0]: https://www.marklawrence.buzz/2025/08/the-ai-vs-authors-resu...

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#137

Post by fpoling »

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…

Presence of many options directly affect equity prices.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#138

Post by starkparker »

Maybe eventually, but not now. Our AI-crazed org is doing everything possible to have us automate our jobs out and has laid off anyone who isn't hitting their targets to do so. Our CEO point-blank said he wants our department cut by end of the FY. Same org just acquihired dozens of senior SWEs.
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