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

191–200 of 224 posts

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#191

Post by polnoner »

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.

I think you are too close to the trees though to see the forest.

I have made digital art for 30 years and this all just sounds like what people use to say about digital art in general.

The main problem I see with generative art is not that you can tell it is generative. It is that most the art is shit. The same way if you gave a 1000 random people a blank canvas and paint, most the paintings would be shit too.

The counter example is there is a billboard that I see driving sometimes that is obviously AI generated graphics. It is so eye catching compared to any of the other billboards because most billboards are boring.

You are just puppeting the standard gate keeping bullshit to a new art form and personally I sick of reading this.

Who the fuck are you to say what art is or what art can be?

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#192

Post by fennecfoxy »

GuB-42 wrote: post #144

This argument can be applied to anything AI does. AI can do bad writing, bad code, bad graphics and bad music. But AI cannot (yet?) do the job of a skilled writer, coder, graphical artist and musician. And it is the same problem every time, LLMs lack intention. That's essentially what the article is about, writers choose every word because they have something to convey. Something complex, deliberate, that can't fit i…

I mean a lot of it comes down to:

"Give me a poster for my band playing a gig"

Versus

"Give me a poster for my band playing a gig, it should have x y and z. Use a x' artistic style and include elements of y'. The layout should be z'..."

You ask for the default, you get the default.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#193

Post by fennecfoxy »

Given what I have seen in recent Hollywood "writing" I would not be surprised if when correctly prompted an LLM can outdo a lot of the disposable, predictable writing in modern shows.

Every story boils down to the same predictable elements, even so-called twists are just repeats of the same old twists. Every story is boy-meets-girl, the friendly character at the start is the real villain, it was all just a dream, the power of friendship, etc.

I just asked GPT5 medium for something along those lines and got (condensed): humanity discovers a phenomenon in that the universe has started compressing causality, things start disappearing because they did not have a large enough influence upon the universe - someone's childhood hobby, a friendship that was tenuous at best and their journey is how to deal with (and ultimately mitigate) this new feature of physics.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#194

Post by GuB-42 »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #192
GuB-42 wrote: post #144

This argument can be applied to anything AI does. AI can do bad writing, bad code, bad graphics and bad music. But AI cannot (yet?) do the job of a skilled writer, coder, graphical artist and musician. And it is the same problem every time, LLMs lack intention. That's essentially what the article is about, writers choose every word because they have something to convey. Something complex, deliberate, that can't fit i…

I mean a lot of it comes down to: "Give me a poster for my band playing a gig" Versus "Give me a poster for my band playing a gig, it should have x y and z. Use a x' artistic style and include elements of y'. The layout should be z'..." You ask for the default, you get the default.

The thing is, at some point, it takes so much work telling the AI exactly what to do that you are better off doing the damn thing yourself.

AI can help with the execution, and for an amateur, this is important. But for real pros, the ones who actually know the appropriate style and what the layout should be, they usually have the execution nailed down. Prompting will likely drag them down, if they use AI, it is more likely to be in the form of "augmenter" tools: upscaling, content-aware fill, etc...

Again, same idea with code. Programming languages are only an issue for inexperienced coders, for those who really know what they are doing, it is usually second nature, and they may be better served writing the code themselves than trying to get a LLM to do it. Again, AI has its use: completion, analysis, etc...

That's also the reason why I believe that so many people are missing the point with generative AI taking jobs. Because they are not in the field, they only see the execution, image editing software, DAWs and programming languages look arcane, they think it is what takes the most skills, and that if you can get over it using AI, you can do just as well. The truth is that it is not the case, not by a long shot, execution is just the first step.

It is a problem for juniors however. Juniors are at the first step, they have the execution but not much more, they need to grow real skills, but how will they grow these skills if no one want them because they are at the level where AI can do most of their job.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#195

Post by throwaway_2494 »

The problem with AI writing is that it can't add produce the texture of lived experience.

This would mean the specificity of details, thoughts and sensations as filtered through a specific individual.

There is a theory that what we perceive as beautiful in a face is that every feature, distance between the eyes, width of nose, distance between cheekbones etc is average. Note that a random face is very unlikely to have every feature be average.

With AI writing, the problem is the reverse. LLMs have captured lived experience, but it's the smooshed over experiences of millions of people.

It's not able to create a unique viewpoint which is believable. What comes out are average thoughts, sensations and details, but good writing lives in the specific.

AI's problem isn't that it can't generate unusual things. It's that it struggles to generate believable conjunctions of ordinary things.

But even this is too reductive. AIs don't have a body or a 'soul.' They don't know what it feels like to be a person, so they can't write like one.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#196

Post by TFNA »

Symbiote wrote: post #186
fpoling wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the answer is no. Reading or just owning a book by a certain author can be a matter of fashion or prestige. That allows for really bad work still be published.

If it's just for prestige, they should buy the original (English?) version and get even more prestige.

Proficiency in English in Spain is still rather low, and someone carrying around the original could be challenged to show they actually understand it.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#197

Post by ahartmetz »

TFNA wrote: post #89
mrweasel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might come down to that they don't care (enough). They could probably do it if they had to (hire a lot of professional editors and authors to train models), but AGI seems more profitable and also a better "story" for investors than models that are good at writing.

Thing is, LLMs don't seem to be the right vehicle for AGI, but even if the nerds understand that, see above about profit perspectives and investors. These companies are under insane pressure to deliver the next super hit or be seen trying.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#198

Post by ProllyInfamous »

kranner wrote: post #156
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.

Have seen the same thing happen to literary translator friends. Barring the very rare few who broke through to international fame via well-known literary award, the rest were largely sustaining themselves with more mundane business translations and that work is ended.

My father knows a guy that financed a Texas mansion, for $2MM, using the collateral from his decade of running a very large technical document translation service (US resident, using foreign workforce from his homeland), popular throughout the 2010s.

Was a beautiful house, which I briefly lived in during scatterbrained renovations (never met the new owner).

The bank forclosed on his house ~late2024/early2025... anybody can now just use an LLM to translate (in real time), on sub-$300 hardware (offline, open-source models run via e.g: Whisper[GUI]).

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#199

Post by BoredomIsFun »

cautiouscat wrote: post #142
akoboldfrying wrote: post #136

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…

This is something that constantly gets missed by HN in discussions about AI in the arts. There's the quality of the output and the essence behind the art itself. Humans want both [1][2] but these models only provide an output. Could ChatGPT output the next IT or Lord of the Rings , probably. However, once it's understood that it wasn't written by a human it loses all value. I use this quote by Kane Parsons a lot but…

> However, once it's understood that it wasn't written by a human it loses all value.

Hmm...No. I actually enjoy generating short stories for myself - after light editing they are great; they are enjoyable irrespective of the provenance.

Re: The safest job from AI may be writing

#200

Post by BoredomIsFun »

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, they use "the same cadence and cliches" because they inflate a short and ambiguous prompt into long and specific prose by making statistical assumptions

Even if LLM output has to largely follow some statistical rules, yet, first of all, some amount of randomness is normally injected during token generation, and, secondly same true for human speech.

> 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.

This is not true, as LLM has internal knowledge storet in its weight. Unless you force it to produce 2000 words doc out of 3 word prompt, you would end up adding some sense information.

>Users can use more elaborate prompts that shift the voice away from the most normative and towards some other nodes, but they need to put in special effort for that, and what people-at-scale specifically want from these tools is to put in very little effort, so we can expect that overwhelming number of casual and naive users will always be generating cliche slop with them.

True, here I agree with you. But using finetuned or simply less popular models like Kimi, Hy etc. should take care of that.

Post reply on HN