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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

#171

Post by ellis0n »

ellis0n wrote: post #153
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…

Totally agree. LLMs are taking over everything related to intellectual work and work in general. But that doesn’t mean people will have nothing to do. The show will go on and humanity will probably split into those who work deeply with AI and create an AI economy, where AIs develop and interact with each other (much like cloud systems do today) and a human world where people compete with other people both in art and…

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Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#172

Post by smfjaw »

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…

Agree, Hunter S Thompson would've never written fear and loathing were he not a sports journo first

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#173

Post by Arya_xiaofan »

fluoridation wrote: post #170
Arya_xiaofan wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another translation use case worth considering. For non-native English speakers, AI can help express ideas they already have in a language they're less comfortable with. Especially on forums like HN, the AI isn't generating the person's views - it's helping them say that what they already mean more clearly in English.

Those people were never going to pay a human translator, though.

That's true.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#174

Post by skissane »

> The stuck-in-slop state of LLM writing is not from lack of trying. AI labs already tried hard on improving prose and hit a wall. LLM giants would have loved to ship better writing capability to conquer marketing, copywriting, and publishing at zero marginal cost.

This doesn't ring true to me.

LLM prose can be greatly improved with the right prompts.

Now, prose with the right prompts may well still not be as good as a good human writer would write – but it is a lot better than what LLMs produce by default.

If the model can perform better with the right prompts, it suggest they haven't actually done everything they could in the post-training to maximise writing quality.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#175

Post by weeu »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #157
ncr100 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also disagree with the author. The first careers I witnessed being negatively impacted by AI coming onto the scene .. just a couple years ago .. was tech writers. Source: my personal network of tech writer colleagues.

tech writers disrupted by AI a couple of years ago? Seems very dubious. A couple of years ago, AI was terrible at writing anything.

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Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#176

Post by weeu »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #76
quickthrowman wrote: post #24

Earlier 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…

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.

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Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#177

Post by spijdar »

svachalek wrote: post #158
spijdar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The entire output of an LLM is also part of its input. Appending to long stretches of LLM-generated text, it will continue to get more and more robotic as the style of the input gets replicated and enhanced in the output. It's possible to work around by generating short passages at a time with carefully constructed setup. But it's a real pain.

It's that, yeah, but coming from multiple orders of abstraction.

In this case, part of the experiment was to see what "oh-my-pi", a "fat and feature rich" LLM harness, could do when coupled with modern GPT, given a 6k~ word overview of a story, and told to come up with a plan to write/review/audit it, making use of subagents and all the fun new groovy LLMisms...

Part of the problem was just "it was basing its style off the last scene/chapter", but part of it was also that its instructions were constantly being "compressed" through repeated compactions. Even with the use of subagents, the "top level" agent's prompt was getting muddied, and in the "review" phase, it began to focus more and more on creating increasingly complex ledgers.

You can see this happen in the "plan" files it created for each chapter, looking at word count:

   1304 d1-ch-01.md
   3701 d1-ch-02.md
   5151 d1-ch-03.md
   6462 d1-ch-04.md
   9587 d1-ch-05.md
  10605 d1-ch-06.md
So it wasn't just that the prose was being based on an increasingly compressed "style" of the prior context window, but the planning for writing each scene was, itself, becoming fixated on the "continuity error correction" process itself, to the point where by the end, it had mostly forgotten about the prose part, and was completely fixated on ensuring maximum state continuity.

This could definitely be fixed, but honestly, I've about had my fill of the "autonomous writing agent" goal. The idea was to make a model that could generate sufficiently interesting stories based on "vague premises" for my personal entertainment, but, "surprise", getting LLMs to actually produce both "new" and "coherent" content beyond what you specify is _hard_.

It seems like you really do need to just stay "in-the-loop" with every scene, and constantly provide correction/feedback, to correct the "semantic drift".

Or, gasp, I could just try writing things by hand again... :-)

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#180

Post by nixon_why69 »

fluoridation wrote: post #159
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 will definitely not take over translation for a long time. Machine translation has improved to the point it's mostly no longer incoherent, but for non-formulaic content it's still very hit-and-miss, not that much better compared to 10-20 years ago. For example, something they still struggle with is consistently translating terms coined within the text with consistent phrases. >A budding painter or a musician could…

> For example, something they still struggle with is consistently translating terms coined within the text with consistent phrases.

Harness issue, just explicitly tell them to maintain a vocabulary as they go for proper nouns and novel terms.

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