The irony of a grammatical mistake in the title of the piece is killing me. It should read - “The job safest from AI may be writing”
The safest job from AI may be writing
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Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
They DO vote with their wallets, though. They're still buying that crap, don't they?
Since you can't really go buy the same work translated by a different publisher, voting with your wallet means boycotting it. I agree it would be the right option to punish publishers, but people find it frustrating to miss out on both the work they were hyped for and its fandom; the latter is a really big deal for those deep into reading subcultures.
I know, but really, in the 21st century, aren't there many substitutes for whatever pop-hype we're talking about? Not enough worlds with wizards, or swords, or dragons, or whatever you like?
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#223Earlier 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.
Yeah not seeing it for technical writing. Especially in industries with even a hint of regulatory compliance, the imprecision is too significant. It's not for lack of trying or wishful thinking. Either your colleagues are facing stiffer competition off-shore (not LLM driven) or their jobs were more about organizing, checking and sorting topics and data (LLMs can take that away)
As a tech writer myself, I often hear from other tech writers around the world that they find themselves as editors for llm-written slop. The main problem is that even before llns, almost no senior manager understood what the TWs actually do. As a result, there is a strong desire to get rid of the editor team.(see the case of Snowflake when a team of 70 documentarians was let go in a single day).
The company I work for also encourages us to use agents as much as possible. Now, I spend more time in the terminal than in VS Code. However, the situation is different for those who work in regulated areas.
Re: The safest job from AI may be writing
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can brute force it by making it try random stuff then judge itself on it. You don't have to always use an LLM's output. Sometimes you can use that plus other things to add flavor. An LLM is actually really good at judging if something is good or bad. It just has a really hard time coming up with new things. But if you had unlimited compute you can throw in some rng and whimsy and get something resembling what hum…
You can prove that doing this will spiral training into a fixed point. There was a lot of research into getting this to work in the past, but it never truly worked well. The hope was that if RLVR was used quite a bit, and the general performance crossed some threshold, that it would then be possible. However, since it has been shown that RLVR only concentrates the distribution of outputs rather than truly shift it, I doubt this will ever be a viable strategy.