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Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

simonwillison.net

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Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#91

Post by moltar »

nubg wrote: post #63
moltar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I tried using LLMs to write a compelling copy for a landing page and it’s just not that great. I tried a lot. A real copywriter will do a lot of research about your ICP and write targeted copy.

This tell us more about your (lacking) skills at using AI than the state of AI tools themselves. You're probably using the free lobotomized versions of LLMs, and shooting a one-off short ambiguous prompt and wondering why it didn't turn out the way you imagined. Meanwhile people spend hundreds of dollars on pro LLM access and learn to use tool calling, deep research, agents and context engineering.

No, I was using top tier models (paid) and even had an extensive eval test suite against multiple models.

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#92

Post by dwoldrich »

thangalin wrote: post #84
morgengold wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sketching out the basic idea how to eliminate the change of currency for food? Sounds interesting.

https://autonoma.ca/model.png By wholly automating food distribution, from seed to delivery, we eliminate the costs of high-quality, nutritious food, relying on volunteers for infrequent system maintenance. (This requires bootstrapping capitalism; I won't dive into the details here, because it would take a book ...) Aside, that diagram is in the novel and was drawn about ten years ago.

Your system sounds centralized, and because lots of other people/the government are involved, I predict it will produce a cyberpunk, pink slime and soylent green dystopia.

I have lost faith that other people who are not in my situation will do kind, high quality work for my benefit over long periods of time (my lifetime.)

I have a crazy dream of single families or neighborhoods owning land and owning lots of cheap open source robots that tend crops and maintain one another over time. And when I say cheap, I mean not worth the trouble to steal. Big backyards in urban settings will be coveted, community gardens everywhere. The software to run it would be open source and free, it would be designed to not deplete the land.

Maybe in my scheme no insecticides are needed because the robots can spot them as they enter the fields and kill them with pinching armatures or pew pew lasers.

My dream is probably stupid in a million ways and impossible unless I get lots of F-U money to do it myself. I imagine big ag interests would make it impossible to succeed and then I'd need 2x F-U money to out-lobby them. ;(

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#93

Post by omnimus »

mvkel wrote: post #85
omnimus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that most copywriting is not and shouldn't be very creative. Often times it's just outsiders who know how to make public communication clear. The sad part is that the managers deciding on using AI are the ones who rarely understand what is good public communication - that's why they were hiring someone to help them with it. With AI they get some text that seems legit but the whole process of figuring o…

> it's just outsiders who know how to make public communication clear I'd argue this requires a great deal of creativity. It's how we got "1,000 songs in your pocket." The problem is us, on the consumer side. We are in an era of content hyperinflation. That was true before AI became ubiquitous

You are right. I didn't want to undermine the line of work. It is creative. Better word word would be flair? fancy? Basically content that doesn't try to scream i am special.

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#94

Post by mmooss »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #87
mmooss wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at all the things that have been done and are done. I can look at my life, as can most others (and hopefully, you too). If that's not your experience, I promise you there is far better out there - not perfect, but good and better. > Humans are ... antisocial The well-established facts are that Homo sapiens and related species are 100% social animals; we live in groups and do not survive alone. We're not like wol…

> The well-established facts are that Homo sapiens and related species are 100% social animals You are 100% correct. I was collapsing a concept too far for the metaphor. The more precise way I should have days it was: “Humans aren’t eusocial” It’s going to require the whole of humanity to shed the tribal affiliations in order to survive the transition to the post human world. The human species can’t expand our cortex…

Eusocial and antisocial aren't the only options on the continuum - that's a pretty extreme binary. Also, international cooperation and internationalism are well-trodden paths, even if they aren't popular in the moment - the UN, World Bank / IMF, NATO, EU, OAS, OECD, ISO, etc etc etc. Ironically, the current extreme nationalist wave reflects it too.

It might not be popular now but we have generations of evidence of it working, and tools to make it happen. And most of those were done before the Internet.

> That is not my opinion that is a fact of life

If you say so - but because we only have your say so, it's just opinion.

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#95

Post by nubg »

moltar wrote: post #91
nubg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tell us more about your (lacking) skills at using AI than the state of AI tools themselves. You're probably using the free lobotomized versions of LLMs, and shooting a one-off short ambiguous prompt and wondering why it didn't turn out the way you imagined. Meanwhile people spend hundreds of dollars on pro LLM access and learn to use tool calling, deep research, agents and context engineering.

No, I was using top tier models (paid) and even had an extensive eval test suite against multiple models.

Understood.

Re: Willison on Merchant's "Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry"

#96

Post by readthenotes1 »

bdcravens wrote: post #69
MangoToupe wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and salaries will reflect that. Hilariously naive.

Do you think I mean salaries will go up? That's not what a "buyer's market" means. It means there's more supply, so the buyers (employers) can pay less than in the past. Assuming you understand what I meant: As for being naive, that's hardly true; my opinion comes from experience. When the bubble burst in the early 2000s, you saw a ton of developers looking for work. This pushed salaries down, even for senior and adv…

I think the idea was that the truly exceptional would only survive- and all the nearly exceptional and less competent would be in other fields. As a result, supply would plummet because no one would hire anybody less than the best.

I think the more appropriate analogy from the 2001 bust is if those fields turn into similar to professional sports where you have to be unimaginably, talented and skilled and disciplined, and everybody else is playing in the rec league fact for nothing

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