The safest job from AI may be writing

Perhaps only on the upmarket.

Generally true, yes, but the absolutely best prose I ever got from a local model I can run on my PC (and I've used many, many of them last two years, explicitly for prose) was from a finetune of Qwen-3.6-27b from July 2026.

What makes you think that offloading expertise and making fungible whatever human operators remain necessary has no economic incentives?

Many people go to professionals because they don't know what those x, y, and z are. They don't have the experience, the vision, the taste, or the language to convey what they want. They need someone else with those things to do it for them. Proficiency with the tools (pencil, brush, instrument, etc) is only half the equation. The other half is what to do make and what to express. Most non-artists are bad at both. Others are proficient with the tools, but have no vision, so they help produce other people's visions.

AI might be able to help someone with vision who lacks proficiency with the tools, but I suspect that's a small minority of people.

One of the things that I think a lot of people get confused about is "writing" vs proper written communication of ideas. HN is full of people posting AI-generated copy-paste "writing" about whatever it is they've built, or an idea they've had, or whatever.

A lot of that writing is really bad because of the AI smell, the clunky structure and cliché-ridden awfulness, but strangely some people respond positively to it, because it feels like it might be good writing: it's dramatic, it's got the "AI mic drop", it's got the "this is not X it's Y" and it combines meta-narrative about what it's going to say with ham-fisted attempts to say it.

The net result is that it draws people through the piece by the hand, and if you ignore the AI clichés - or are not familiar with them - you leave feeling like you've read something consequential.

And in some cases, the people who use AI to write for them are surprised if people don't like it, because from their point of view it does the job they wanted it to do, which is to show off whatever it is they are working on.

For a lot of content, that's fine. For people prompt-building something it's a quick and easy "show this off" that is as quick and easy as the prompt they used to build it. Maybe they are iterating ideas and want fast feedback. That's fine - but the "writing" that results is no more valuable that the thing they have "built", because anyone could prompt the same result.

And for a lot of other content, the writing really doesn't need to do anything more sophisticated than fill out a page - it's just eyeballs-for-ads arbitrage, so if you can speed up the process of having something you can drive eyeballs to, and make that cheaper, it probably works.

A lot of writing online was like that before AI came along - there were content farms "spinning" pieces of content from elsewhere, rewriting it, rephrasing it, padding it. Upwork and Fiverr and other marketplaces had loads of "SEO writers" where you could give them sources and they would create five "respins" of everything they published, so that you could feed your low value blogspam farm.

Even a lot of branded editorial publications did this - they would "respin" secondary reporting. A while back I worked on a brand monitoring tool, and it was always interesting to look at the editorial spread - someone published something, another few publications picked it up and rewrote it very quickly, then a whole forest of pieces written from those dripped out over hours or days. If you could land coverage with one of those "ignition" publications you didn't need to promote much further, because there was a natural ecosystem of editorial content farms that would pick up, rewrite, paraphrase and publish.

But that's not "writing" in the sense of something that has been crafted with care for someone else to read, consider and carry away with them. I suspect that's also why AI writes so badly though, because it was trained on human-generated content slop, and on "editorial content" created by people who don't know - and don't care - what good writing looks like. Which, I guess, is why the ingestion of books is now becoming so important. If you train on blogs and reddit comments, the output will resemble blogs and reddit comments.

I wrote about this in another comment here recently - how a fair proportion of people don't know good writing, and how a lot of people don't have the reading sophistication to be able to distinguish between "good" writing and "bad" writing. And in fact, a lot of people find "good" sophisticated writing too hard to understand, so don't read it.

AI has already filled the low value writing gap.

Where it probably won't compete - for now - is editorial sensibility in writing, and editorial voice. The thing that makes someone say "that's AI bullshit" or "there's an inconsistency of ideas in this piece" or "what is the actual story here". From a code perspective, you can compare that to architecture vs code monkeying. Editorial sensibility is architecture, the actual writing - putting of words on the page - is code monkeying. And, like code, the actual writing doesn't necessarily take much time or effort, but the editorial pruning and finessing does.

Good writing is about being able to read, research, digest and have ideas - and make diverse connections between things that might not look the same. But that's the same as great software architecture, which is about "what does this actually need to do, and how are people going to use it". And it's about being able to read what you have written, critically appraise it, and ruthlessly edit, cut, and rewrite.

Good writing starts with "what is the message, why does this matter, and what broader context do my readers need to understand why they should care?"

And when someone is showing off something they have built, or trying to communicate complex ideas in a coherent way, that's where I think AI falls down, because however many words the AI writes, and however convincing they look on the page, unless the human has spent time working with the text it's probably not worth reading.

I write a lot, and after playing around with AI I quickly realised that none of the big AI companies have tools that would allow me to explain a thing I want to write, click "go" and sit back with my feet up. What AI is very good at, though, is as an editorial rubber duck, where I can discuss my ideas with AI, create structure, create bullets and article plans that I - an actual human - can then write from. That helps me a lot when I want to explain complex things, or draw threads from several different disparate things into one coherent argument.

I see AI as a way to get to what I want to write more effectively - but I gave up trying to get the AI to write for me, in my tone of voice, a long time ago.

Maybe that will change - but I can't see a world where I would allow AI to write in my tone of voice without applying significant editorial oversight of my own to what it is generating. And that's what takes the time. Would I allow AI to replace that, even if it could write properly? Probably not.