It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT | Hacker News Reader

It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

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> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin.

A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change. Only time will tell. A thousand different outcomes are possible: the downstream client is upset by the reduction in quality and switches vendors; new entrants underbid the market further; firms start to differentiate on quality at a price premium, further eroding low end margins; the money saved on this is invested in new roles for to ensure marketing quality control.

The error is to believe that a given state of the world is static. It never is. Every day, millions of very smart and capable humans apply their minds to figure out how to make money by selling a product or service that satisfies. And everyday, what it takes to satisfy customers changes a little bit.

Posts like this drop all the context that led to such a job even being possible in the first place.

As horrified as I am for people whose jobs will be lost (including mine, quite possibly), "content" is such a plague on humanity I'm glad it will soon be devalued into the ground. Moutains of useless tweets and blog posts will be rendered meaningless when ChatGPT has all the answers. Dust to dust.

wait until it starts training on its own output

and the spammers realise they can influence its output by producing more spam

With how rich YouTubers / influencers are getting, I think relationship building / becoming a celebrity will become more and more necessary

To rift off your observation, Perhaps becoming more and more human will become the de facto trustworthy brand?

I both strongly agree (“content is a plague”) and strongly disagree (artisans, even digital ones, make society better).

I’m glad that we’ll hopefully see the end of content as an industry, where people churn out text and images and posts trying to monetize attention by the penny. It’s inevitable as content becomes effectively free. How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creators? I’m pretty sure medium can be replaced in entirety today.

That said, there’s plenty of people who work hard and are immensely talented and contribute a lot to society. Technology and automation has slowly taken away many jobs that brought people satisfaction and we’re anything but BS jobs. My classic example is musicians. It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).

I don’t have the answers, but I hope that automation can start replacing BS jobs through AI.

> It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).

I do wonder if people are going to start valuing in-person experiences more and more, as anything on the internet can now be faked (or AI-generation, which, artistically speaking, is close to the same thing). If we do, might we see a boom of live performers? Will minstrels make a comeback? An interesting possibility, if still not reassuring.

More likely outcome is that people will consume even more content. Because it will be more addictive and tailor made for them.

Seems like big capture of peoples minds by comporations.

But is the idea of "content" really all that?

When I listen to a recording of a 18th century Danish fiddle tune, is it a bunch of notes and chords that can be imitated? Sure. And it can certainly be imitated by a professional human style imitator or an AI.

But I'm not just looking for a string of pleasant chords and tones to massage my feelings. The context is part of what it is. It's not really "content", it's communication. The guy who made it, wanted to say something. Something that was important to him, which he thought better put into music than into text. He's dead almost 300 years ago, but I want to hear what he wanted to say.

Which isn't to say there isn't room for AI-generated (or professional composer-generated) imitations. They're trained on the real stuff, it's the echo of real people we hear. But that's why it's valuable, not as generic "content".

Context is certainly important. Atleast for people who lived through times when art took human effort and was rare.

But what if upcoming generations see it just as something antique? Old concept thats dead because their concept of art/media has always been tailor made and generated for them.

Also who says the AI wont also generate the context. You will get some medival music with authors backround and everything. You might not even know the person didnt exist. The way AI is developing now nobody will care about AI just making things up on the way.

Live performance hasn't gone away. I live outside a village (in Ireland) with around 1000 residents and there's live music in one or other of the pubs 4 nights (or more) a week

Irish trad scene is unique in this regard. There are Irish trad sessions everywhere in the world (I was able to visit some in quite faraway places like Moscow, Istanbul or Santiago de Chile), and in Ireland there are a few in every village, and then some.

But that's just it, Irish trad. Frenchies have something similar with balfolk, but not so epic, and while there are other strong European folk scenes, none of them is on the scale of Irish trad. Alas.

Source: I play jigs and reels for fun.

It's not just trad though really - there's a bit of trad (and a fair few ballads) in my local pub but you could also hear pretty much any popular song from the last 50 years.

(... for anyone who's curious - "trad" usually means traditional dance music like jigs and reels, "ballads" mostly means Irish-y sounding songs sung in English)

Although circleofavshape's observation applies equally well to my part of the US. Even very tiny towns around here have live music multiple nights per week.

> I do wonder if people are going to start valuing in-person experiences more and more, as anything on the internet can now be faked

Probably not.

If I like some content, why would I care it it is "fake"?

The past 30 years have resulted in an erosion of in-person experiences. People used to be social: clubs, bowling, movies, whatever. Now people even work from home.

People prefer to be in their houses on their computers and to interact with “others” (people, bots, videos of people doing things) from their favorite chair.

I don’t think in-person experiences are coming back any time soon unless there is some sort of major cultural shift that nobody could predict. A lot has been written about this trend.

The problem with in-person experiences is other people. If we could solve that problem, the experience would be greatly improved. :)

> artisans, even digital ones, make society better

The word "content," when applied to digital media, usually carries some implications of artlessness. Content is something that fills a container.

Music that moves you and changes you is art, and is unlikely to be automated any time soon. Music that plays in an elevator (or fills the silence in an elevator) is Content, and is highly likely to be automated soon.

A lot of 'content' to me is worse than elevator music. That at least tries to somewhat improve my experience (though you may not like it). A piece of 'content' as an intro to a recipe is there primarily to make the page longer and contain keywords for SEO purposes, but it makes my experience worse.

I don’t know about that. The way I hear it used, every YouTube video is content, even the very good stuff. HBO and Netflix are content. NBA Games are “live content”. It’s just a catch all for digital media

People do use it that way, which is a real shame because -- like the commenter you're replying to -- "content" to me implies something inferior.

Well to the suits at ESPN, HBO, Netflix, and YouTube, those video files are indeed content. They are the contents of their platform.

But if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense, because you're kind of reducing their work to a mere consumable product.

Yes, art can be packaged up and put on a platform and distributed and profited off of, or bought and sold on an online store like toasters and dish soap, but that's not the reason it exists - it's form of human expression.

Just as not all digital content is art (e.g. NBA games), and not all digital art is content.

> if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense

This. And when I hear creative types use the word "content" to refer to their own work, I feel pity for them. And am much less inclined to check their work out, because it it seems that their mindset is to produce a product rather than art.

Especially if they refer to their audience as "consuming" their "content".

> How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creator?

I can tell you don't use TikTok and don't understand how quickly the trends adapt and depend on human understanding of hyper niche cultural trends.

Nothing about GPT indicates it can engage in this without heavy human interference.

At most it'd at least depend on being able to replicate human generated videos on prompt (which it's far from doing without horror show uncanny valley but sure... one day eventually in the indefinite future, which is the least interesting problem) let alone all the niche cultural stuff... and critically reputation signals already strongly required. Humans are deeply intwined in all of these, with automation playing a marginal optimisation role not anything near replacement.

Cheap imitations will remain a novelty for a long time. Just like how deepfakes and GPT news articles were oversold as a serious problem in the near term but haven't borne out beyond niche failures and journalist FUD posting.

If anything, Tik Tok trends are perfectly imperfect, which makes them feel more like what can be generated from any 13B or better LLM.

People are bad at modeling and scale. LLMs don't suffer from that, but the way people interact with LLMs obviously doesn't indicate they can conceptualize what a billion people interacting with the same model with the same parameters and having a billion unique experiences implies.

How we interface with LLMs is a deceptive reflection, and if you don't recognize the depth in them, you'll be caught off guard when you fall in, or something larger than you expect comes out.

It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job). > Well, and because people love it, many will still be passionate musicians / writers / language savants. They just won't make a living out of it. And thats ok. The intrinsic motivation to do those things is recreational and the focus on monetization contributed to the "content is plague" trend in the first place.

Musicians have also had incomes become way less evenly distributed, after recording started one star could reach millions, before that you needed to see a musician live to hear music. Tim Hartford did a good pod cast mentioning this.

> My classic example is musicians. It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).

I am not sure I agree with this. The barrier to entry to selling your own music (streaming, youtube) is so low that we see more and more people giving it a shot. Maybe they are not professionnel with a title, but they are musicians. Sure, maybe there are less orchestra performers but there are far more (smaller) groups to choose from. Did they really disappear?

I think that's because for most, it's moved from being a profession to a hobby. Many hobbyists dream of turning their hobby into a profession, and work towards that, yet for most it remains a hobby.

> but they are musicians

I think the GP meant professional musicians.

Recorded audio didn't replace the musicians creating music. It replaced the ones playing it - for example the pianists at the restaurants or the clubs.

In a modern Casablanca remake Bogart wouldn't say "Play it, Sam", he would just select a song from his Spotify playlist and hit play.

In a similar fashion, you don't need to hire a full band for a wedding. A single DJ will provide enough entertainment.

I would say there will probably be more demand for live music since at some point YouTube music will probably have a channel that just makes up music on the fly based on what you like. So your computer can produce any sound or mashup that you want. But there will never be ai live music in the same way as people unless you have undetectable robot people.

This "content" industry is a very recent phenomenon.

It used to be that if you wanted your voice to be heard, you had to either have something unique to say, or some unique way to say it.

We'll likely revert to the status quo - only people whose content will be consumed online will be original voices.

There's also what society values. While I'm no art historian, it looks that after the invention of the camera, painters shifted to different styles that were not replicable by cameras (e.g. landscapes and portraits to abstract), and high society began valuing the new art, while continuing to value the old, the new shifted aesthetics.

I think that as we're progressing into a world where anyone can press a few buttons and get a dubstep banger in 30 seconds, culture will place higher value on different types of expression and experiences.

"We went to see a band play an entirely improvised performance, capacity was limited to 20 people and all recording devices were confiscated upon entry."

'Content' is going to be so much better when it's written by gpt ... lol.

ChatGPT has the answers it has because of all that content people have been posting online. What happens when people stop posting and there is nothing to further train the ai? Ai doesn't have intrinsic value, it has to be trained on something

It's not going to go away, though. If anything, the future looks like lower quality and higher quantity. The usefulness of ChatGPT's (and its successors') answers also depend on their inputs. In the limit, if there were no humans producing new material, there would also be nothing new that ChatGPT version N could tell you.

Something something 100 monkeys with a typewriter? I'm expecting some margin of error introduced into these models that produces a surreal fever dream era of AI generated content on the internet.

There doesn't need to be new material. Just mechanism to segregate between good and bad and that will always exist if humans are interesting.

LLMs use reinforcement learning once they have a base understanding of words. It's like how modern chess engines don't analyze games, just play against themselves.

LLMs go even further where they train a model to judge what people would deem to be high quality, so it's another layer

That works because chess is a closed world. Without input from outside, two LLMs training against each other would most likely become raving lunatics -- just as two humans locked in a dark cell together would do.

> LLMs use reinforcement learning > LLMs go even further where they train a model to judge what people would deem to be high quality, so it's another layer

You're describing RLHF (Reinforcement learning with Human Feedback) used by ChatGPT, right.

I wouldn't say that LLMs use it, but RLHF is used to create a higher level model on top of a LLM.

Creative writing output from GPT-4 like everything else is a huge jump from 3.5(and it gets even better with targeted refinement). People say 60% as good or whatever but don't be too surprised if it's already much closer or even surpassing the human baseline in question.

I don't think it matters if AI is a better writer. From the post:

"[...] although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin."

So yeah if we consumers of content are lucky we won't see much of a difference, but the web has been in a break-neck race to the bottom for over a decade now. Companies that pay for the creation of content have and will continue to pay as little as they can as long as the content generates clicks. Given that 27.7% of those clicks come from bot farms[1] (and that number is rising) we already see a huge market that's just bots writing content and monetizing it for other bots. We humans will get to sift through that to try to find real content.

[1] https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/b...

Replace "AI" with "his cousin" and it's the same crappy outcome, but not a story.

It’s the same sentiment as being angry the printing press is robbing scribes of their job.

It just might be that technology advances and society no longer has the same need for your skill and you need to adapt.

The printing press was an upgrade, the FTA is a cost cutting downgrade.

If I drive a luxury sports car and I lose my job, I might get rid of the luxury car and switch to a compact. Both are good enough, one is cheaper. That’s the way the world works.

It’s not nice to hear the results of a bot are good enough when you know your results are better. Tough luck.

> A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change.

Only if you focus on long-term macroeconomics, and ignore the impact of microeconomics on real people. Today, this writer is out of a major chunk of their income.

As someone who manages our own brand's social media, and just started using ChatGPT, I was surprised ChatGPT could provide with captions that are pretty good and moderately inspiring. Try it out yourself. Definitely a timesaver and cost-reduction

I wrote about this same exact thing (on a throwaway so my other employees don't see this) from the perspective of the employer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484643

---- I'm writing on a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I run a mid sized software company that does a mix of software consulting and saas. Quite common these days. I want to share a real story about how chatgpt eliminated a marketing job. I have a full time marketing person who writes content (case studies, blog posts, client testimonials etc) and does SEO optimization for our website. He's not technical, but understands the problem we are solving and knows how to talk to customers.

Writing a case study, blog post or a marketing tweet took a bit of work. I'd brainstorm with him what topics to write about, he'd run some drafts by me and then after 2 - 3 revisions we'd publish it. With chatgpt I'd just write what I wanted in point form and get back a polished product in a few seconds. It gives you exactly what you wanted but puts it across in a way that's much better quality than what what the marketing person could do. Most importantly, none of the key points I wanted to make get lost in translation.

I decided last week to lay off the marketing person (2 months full pay severance) because I did not see the value in paying for a full time marketer when I can do a better/faster job with AI. I think this is the new reality that a lot of sales/marketing jobs will face.

I don't know why you got the downvotes, I guess people decided your story was a lie. Interesting nonetheless.

Maybe because he had hired a marketing guy to write his own client testimonials?

From experience, when working with clients on case studies and testimonials the individual concerned will often talk to the marketing team and then the marketing team will transform their comments into something short and snappy for approval before publishing. Perhaps that’s what is meant by ‘writing testimonials’ in this case?

Sure, maybe he does, but if that's so then we should read that and respond. Down voting and flagging such a comment isn't helpful. It's not even an opinion people don't like, it's something that has happened, and, if true that's very relevant.

This is a good thing. One more bullshit job eliminated that only exists to make the numbers go up.

This will be hard, but as a society, we need to examine the entire reasoning behind "jobs" and why "more jobs = more gooder". The entire foundation of that line of thought is fundamentally flawed.

If a job makes the "numbers" (by that I assume you mean revenue or profit) go up, then by definition, it's not a bullshit job, it's a productivity enhancer.

It depends, you could just be stealing the numbers from elsewhere. One companies gain does not imply increased productivity in society.

Companies aren't trying (nor should they) to improve society's productivity, only their own.

Yes, well, that doesn't exactly go against my point does it?

'Bullshit jobs' is an indictment of the socioeconomic system that enables such jobs to exist in the first place. It is not an indictment of the individual doing the job; the psychological association between oneself and their bullshit job is at the heart of the analysis. I like this definition:

>"a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Right, which is why, by definition, if a person's job improves revenue or profit (i.e. "numbers go up") then it isn't "pointless" or "unnecessary," therefore it isn't a bullshit job. Thanks for clearing that up.

Until that jobs is yours, because not everyone is an AI scientist/developer.

Prepare for social unrest.

Where I live, at lest in a medium-sized town in the US, there's a huge amount of work in hospitality, construction, skilled trades, healthcare, and every other field you can imagine. The only commonality is that none of those careers include "making content" or "social media". It's like at some point during the COVID pandemic people forgot that everyone can't sit at a computer.

Enjoy your schadenfreude. I legitimately hope it doesn't happen to you!

“It’s fine if it happens to someone else”

Hospitality and healthcare occupations are doing badly in much of the Western World. Construction is highly seasonal, and arguably much of it is currently driven by an investment bubble rather than organic demand which could pop, ending in a long winter. Skilled trades, maybe, but you need a healthy job market so that people can afford these.

While these occupations are safe from AI, for time being, they're not safe per se.

> you need a healthy job market so that people can afford these.

So much this. I was reading recently about how remote white collar work has strongly stimulated trades workers like electricians and plumbers. Once all of the high-paying remote work is gone, who is going to be able to pay for that sort of work outside of doctors?

> there's a huge amount of work in hospitality, construction, skilled trades, healthcare, and every other field you can imagine.

These are mostly bottom-of-the-barrel jobs that can't find and hold on to good people. I worked in hotels back in high school and I wouldn't wish that experience on my worst enemy. Broadly speaking, these industries are hiring a ton right now because they've historically underpaid employees and struggle to find people who are willing to work for poor wages and toxic cultures.

Do Software engineers/Developers really feel they are safe here?

Maybe the top dogs who are working on groundbreaking stuff, but as a normal backend/DevOps dude, I am fucking terrified.

Said elsewhere previously[0] but the reason is simple: because the only way we as a society have to distribute a stable supply of food and shelter is for (most) every individual to have a job. "more jobs = more gooder" flows directly from that: "people need food → food requires job → we need jobs".

Changing that has to come before the bullshit jobs are wiped out or there will be an even worse situation.

[0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35470255

If AI output is 60% as good as a person, but costs 1/1000th the price... what decision maker is going to justify paying 1000x more for 40% more quality? We're really in for it.

What if there was a cheeseburger that was 50% as good as McDonalds but was only a nickel? That'd be real bad for the McD's share price.

I don't think I'd accept anything worse than McDonald's if they paid me to eat it.

McDonald’s already is that product. It costs 1/4th as much as a restaurant burger. And half the time it’s just as good.

You need to find better burger places if McDonalds is just as good half the time.

I have a list of known good ones but unfortunately it seems like picking any random place will quite often make something worse than McDonalds which is a pretty baseline decent burger.

I've been told though that McDonalds in Australia is higher quality than other countries so this might affect things.

You need to try McDonald's in Japan. It's not gourmet of course, but at least it looks like the pictures on the menu and is put together exactly the way it's supposed to be.

Don’t live in the US, but most cooks here don’t like making burgers or any type of ‘fast food’, so when they have burgers, it’s usually a beer bar and the burgers are much worse than McDonald’s. And personally I find McDonalds inedible, let alone most of the rest.

That was my conclusion last time I ate at Harveys. The "meat" was just plain bad.

Agreed, as long as the AI crosses whatever perceived threshold for quality you need.

> If AI output is 60% as good as a person, but costs 1/1000th the price... what decision maker is going to justify paying 1000x more for 40% more quality? We're really in for it.

Really depends on the type of output. For content marketing that most people are just going to skim over anyway (aka is just going to be used for blogspam/content farming, which is what it sounds like the linked writer was doing for this client), yes, it absolutely makes financial sense. But a lot of output is very much winner-take-all: music, movies, TV. Only the top 1%, for some definition of top, of that stuff is actually purchased in meaningful quantities. 60% of top quality of that is worth the same as 0%, which is nothing.

> What if there was a cheeseburger that was 50% as good as McDonalds but was only a nickel? That'd be real bad for the McD's share price.

Not so sure about this; you can look at, for example, generic store-brand colas, which taste exactly the same as Coke and Pepsi and are cheaper, yet Coke and Pepsi haven't collapsed after decades.

> generic store-brand colas, which taste exactly the same as Coke and Pepsi and are cheaper, yet Coke and Pepsi haven't collapsed after decades.

which is because coke & pepsi uses massive advertising campaigns to ensure the brand is doing the heavy lifting. Coke is basically a marketing company that happens to sell a liquid drink.

I would also argue, that they in fact, do not taste the same, even in double blind tests I’ve conducted in this area for college

Even Pepsi and Coca-Cola have obvious differences with many preferring the latter. Store-brand cola is an even bigger difference.

Marketing aside, power-law of costs is fairly common. If a good guitar runs you $300 and a professional guitar runs you $1500, a custom guitar for $40K is still only going to be marginally better.

Every single store sells coke or Pepsi. Supermarkets might have a range of off brand which some taste good and some don’t. But Coke doesn’t cost that much, I’m not going to learn a bunch of new brand with spotty availability to work out which one tastes good to save 30 cent.

They are also distribution network companies. If I'm not mistaken, Coke & Pepsi do their own deliveries. And they are large enough that they will sign exclusivity deals with restaurants and venues to sell their products (often supplying the equipment). Generic store-brands have no reach to venues and restaurants outside of their stores.

I don’t really like any of them but store brand colas definitely don’t taste like coke

And aren't much cheaper either...

Do a double blind test before you say that. In studies, most people can't tell the difference between Coke and Sprite...

Surely you meant Pepsi.

No. I meant Sprite.

Are they 1/1000th the price, though? Because if it's 20-30% cheaper, I'd just buy a Pepsi which is already very cheap.

>But a lot of output is very much winner-take-all: music, movies, TV.

If you look at the state of current movies and TV shows, ChatGPT could do a much better job than today's writers. Heck, some high school kids could do a better job.

Could you provide an example of a hit TV show or $100m+ grossing movie that was written by ChatGPT?

I'm not aware of any but surely Top Gun:Maverick could have been written that way and come out largely the same, at least as far as the script is concerned.

A "hit" TV show? If you mean the very best-written TV shows, probably not. But an average TV show? ChatGPT could do much better.

I think your comment is epitomizing just what a huge blind spot people like you have here. You're comparing AI/ChatGPT with the very best stuff produced by humans, not the average. The average is usually lazy and bad, so it's really not a stretch to conceive of ChatGPT writing something better than that.

As another poster commented here, ChatGPT could have written the latest Top Gun movie. The aviation filming was great, but the story itself made no sense. I can definitely see ChatGPT writing something no worse.

Or maybe movies and TV shows are expertly targeted at someone who isn't you?

>you can look at, for example, generic store-brand colas, which taste exactly the same as Coke and Pepsi and are cheaper

Eh, nope? Like, absolutely nope

Also depends on how much skill/time it takes to transform AI output to something comparable to what a great copywriter could create. Maybe the output is 60% but in 10 minutes you can make it 90%.

Yeah, I think that’s the main point; if you have it output and just pop it online then it will be crap. However, a skilled writer will have it to great content in minutes after. That’s the difference. So if the person in question had a chance, they would offer to use gpt before the employer mentions it, to cut costs and take over the entire content and translation pipeline for that small company. Kill or be killed, so to say.

What if a flight only cost a nickel, but there was a 40% chance it blew up?

Not all errors are equal.

Sometimes 99% as good isn't even close to good enough.

But, yes, for most things 60% for 1/100th the price, is going to cut it.

I’d say you’re flying Peruvian air in the 1970s

> What if a flight only cost a nickel, but there was a 40% chance it blew up?

Everything has failure modes though so this isn't nearly as easy of a comparison...

Just as an example on the analogy, there are plenty of cases of pilot suicide bringing down planes too that one would expect would never happen with pure automation... So you can just as easily turn the analogy around and say people are the "cheap but worse" option.

FWIW, we have been able to create processes to manage risks with unpredictable humans, why couldn't we with AI ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

> So you can just as easily turn the analogy around and say people are the "cheap but worse" option.

No, because this is a factual question with a factual answer. You need to actually know which is more dangerous.

> FWIW, we have been able to create processes to manage risks with unpredictable humans, why couldn't we with AI ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Because humans and AI are different? We are much better at predicting when humans will be wrong than with AI, for one.

Give this option to the thousands that take rickty boats from Asia and Africa for a better life. All your flights will be full.

60% reliable car at 1/1000th of price might not be horrible deal. 13-50 vs 13000-50000 and surely you will accept quite many break downs. Even if you need to call taxi and buy new car...

At least with cars it doesn't take 1/1000th the price to make it sell.

Kia in the early 2000s offered buy one get one deals on their cars. The joke was always that already you would have one car on the road while the other was in the shop.

They honestly were along the lines of 60% reliable compared to Honda or Toyota in my experience. Enough people bought them though that Kia eventually got it together and a decade later could sell a car every bit as good with a better warranty than the rest.

Are you crazy? That would be a phenomenal deal. Each car costs 30 bucks instead of 30k.

Cars would literally be disposable. It's cheaper to throw away than fix.

You buy 5 cars and when one breaks you toss it.

This is a great deal

It'd be cheaper than an Uber. That's what we're dealing with, its not like competing with foreign labor at 1/10th the price.

This was the premise of McDs to begin with: They sold burgers for a dime or whatever while everyone else was charging fifty cents. The trick of drastically undercutting the market, of course, is to use innovation cut your costs, which the brothers did by serving such a limited menu that they could optimize the prep for speed.

This is already the bargain with intellectual property. What if you can get writing 50% as good as Stephen King? Doesn't matter, because the winner takes all and books are infinitely copyable. What if you can run a 400m in 80% of the world record time? Doesn't matter, because you'll only be paid a pittance. What if copilot can write code with only 50% more bugs than an engineer? Doesn't matter if each bug costs an average of tens of millions.

I don't think it's good vs bad, but quality vs volume. If your output is already able to be duplicated at low-to-zero cost then quality is important.

> What if you can run a 400m in 80% of the world record time?

congratulations, you are now the new world record holder ;)

Stephen King is a weird example because there are lots of working writers in the store brand Stephen King market.

Only they don't write like Stephen King. And if an AI was trained to do it (by obviously using SK books), Stephen King would probably sue.

Stephen King writes faster than ChatGPT can.

> What if copilot can write code with only 50% more bugs than an engineer?

Is it only in the “AI gonna take my job” discussions that programmers insist on calling themselves “engineers” or is this just a recent phenomena?

A bit off topic (but not really) and I know I’ll get downvoted (because, yeah…) but somehow the tide has turned from “programmer” to “software engineer” to just “engineer”.

Just think it’s strange.

> Is it only in the “AI gonna take my job” discussions that programmers insist on calling themselves “engineers” or is this just a recent phenomena

Not sure what your standard of “recent” is, but I’ve seen the usage and debate of the “engineer” title since I started programming.

Creative output from GPT-4 like everything else is a huge jump from 3.5. People say 60% as good but don't be surprised if it's already much closer or even surpassing the human baseline in question.

What if surgeons get replaced by better robotics hardware (more accurate cutting techniques than a human hand) and better AI software. The premise that a more experience surgeon is a lot better than a newbie surgeon holds true. How do you become an experienced surgeon? By seeing a lot of cases and knowing what to do when things don't go as planned. What does AI do? It learns over time by seeing more and more cases.

Will it replaced a true star surgeon within the next decades? Likely not. But how many of us have access to the world's best surgeon? Or the world's top 10 or top 1000? Vast majority see one who is local and good enough (or have no choice if you land in an ER with an accident). Those are highly skilled highly trained positions earning high pay.

If you asked me a year ago I would have recommended kids to go into studying medicine and become a surgeon as that surely wouldn't be replaced by computers.

Today I am not so sure this will be a profession for the majority of cases (that don't get to see the highest of skilled) even in 10 or 15 years from now.

Doctors have an unusually strong professional monopoly.

In much of the world they regulate to maintain perpetual under-supply and to ensure they are inserted as bottlenecks in strategic/lucrative places.

When AI comes for health care you can bet that doctors will ensure they have a key role in service delivery.

(BTW: doctors are great! I just wish we had more of them and that on the whole they were less over-worked).

Personally I would not be worrying too much for the doctors.

The OP is talking about surgeons, not doctors. The two are entirely different professions; it's like conflating doctors with nurses, or doctors with medical researchers.

Surgeon is a subset of the doctor set.

Nurse and doctor sets almost never overlap.

> Doctors have an unusually strong professional monopoly.

That won't matter. Once people find out AI/robotic solutions are better than the best human doctors, most will choose AI/robots, they will demand them. People aren't stupid.

Small objective differences create vast differences in outcomes. Those things where that isn't true have already been automated away or commodified so there's very little margin left anyway.

It might be true in a misleading sense that the AI {product} is some large fraction of a genuine {product}, but that doesn't mean anything because the value is contained in those differences above the AI produced baseline. The value floor, so to speak, is a lot higher, but the ceiling hasn't risen an inch.

Those that move down in quality to preserve margin will soon discover there's not a there there.

Where I live, lots of burger restaurants opened up in the last years. Emphasis on the restaurant part, not fast food like McDonald's or Burger King. I very much prefer them, as the food is better and the places are cozier, even though a bit more expensive.

Maybe we'll get a counter movement soon: "made by humans", as in, the premium experience.

Anti AI sentiment may also grow and make that even more viable, as peoplr may boycot heavy-AI shops.

I'm a technical writer at a FAANG and I'm terrified about LLMs taking my job.

I don't worry (yet) that LLMs can produce better docs than I can. A big part of my role is speaking to people to understand what users need to learn, then designing an organization for documentation around that. Writing is of course a big part, but understanding what to write and what not to write is often even more important.

Instead, I worry about a situation like the one in this post, where some exec thinks that AI can get you XX% of the way there for much less money. I think they would be mistaken, but what hurts my case is that it's inherently extremely difficult to demonstrate the value of technical writers quantitatively.

I've personally worked on 3 tickets in the last week related to customers not having a proper understanding of how a feature works due to unclear wording in the official docs. The first one took a lot of time to investigate and find out if it was actually behaving the way it should. Good technical writers are very valuable, with ChatGPT tech writers there will be many more situations like mine!

Were the unhelpful docs written by ChatGPT? Otherwise your story doesn't support your conclusion.

It's more likely LLMs will result in better docs for some projects and worse docs for others.

It really all depends on what an employer values or doesn’t value.

You can always point to Stripe. I’m pretty sure their high quality docs were a huge part of what launched the company. It’s such an important part of the UX.

There will not be technical writers or technical documentation. It will just be whatever the engineers output.

Companies will train an LLM on their product and users will simply interface with that AI. Or there will be a common AI (like chatGPT) that companies offer up all their gross engineering speak documentation to train on.

> A big part of my role is speaking to people to understand what users need to learn, then designing an organization for documentation around that.

If two consultants named Bob show up in your office place, run.

It's occurred to me lately that, even though they rarely produce anything better than "adequate", LLMs being leveraged as a cheaper alternative to human output means we'll be settling for more, worse-quality content. Economics aside, I loathe to think of the day that ChatGPT is used to describe food allergens, hazard warnings, voltage ratings, or any other quantitative analysis with potentially lethal implications for being wrongly-conveyed that are eventually overlooked because an LLM gets it right most of the time.

Maybe a human will double check the AI's work in those cases.

For a while, sure, but complacency tends to set in with automated procedures that usually work. It's the one-in-ten-thousand errors that'll sneak under the nose of the tired prompt engineer who believes his model is accurate enough for that sort of thing to not happen.

This is the kind of thing that humans are the worse at. Our brain skips over the words, filling in what we think it should say.

> an LLM gets it right most of the time

And so do humans. Don't forget that there's plenty of SEO copy writing out there about all kinds of dangerous things that is wrong because the writer didn't understand the topic, couldn't be bothered to copy correctly, changed the meaning while "rewriting" a text etc.

The same goes for quality, imho. Everybody thinks they're a terrific writer, but most writing on websites sucks, most documentation sucks, most FAQs are lacking severely and use vague language in answers that add confusion rather than remove it. I'm not sure if LLMs will really lower the average quality there.

I share your concern about correctness, I just wanted to emphasize that "a human wrote this" does not indicate "this is well-researched and was factually correct at the time of writing".

>most writing on websites sucks, most documentation sucks, most FAQs are lacking severely and use vague language in answers that add confusion rather than remove it. I'm not sure if LLMs will really lower the average quality there.

That's mostly the case because software developers create a lot of these FAQs and documentations, and most aren't good at writing.

Companies with dedicated documentation teams usually have well-written documentation. It's just not the norm.

The frustrating thing is that companies will likely be getting away with stating falsehoods and/or not following through on what the AI claimed they'll do.

Like how in the old days, if you sent a company a contract offer and they accepted it, they would be bound by it. Today, if you send a request to a company's server that they didn't expect and they confirm the contract, they're still later able to renege since you "hacked them" by removing some client-side constraints.

In the same way, I imagine that companies will claim no responsibility for what their AI says, essentially making the experience much worse for consumers. Today, if a customer service rep states something, the company is mostly bound to it. In the future, they'll just claim it was an "AI bug" or a "query injection attack" so they won't honor it.

> The frustrating thing is that companies will likely be getting away with stating falsehoods and/or not following through on what the AI claimed they'll do.

This has been a key feature of digitization generally, delegate responsibility to a computer and remove the autonomy of the human worker. We all just accept that computers screw up so we don't expect better.

I expect the reverse: our tolerance for bland and generic messaging is already too high. With ChatGPT filling our world with it, there'll come a renaissance in clear, pointed, punchy text. Even if it's ChatGPT 5 or 6 generating it.

There's definitely going to be a niche of ironic text that the human can tell is not AI generated, looks like AI generated, and it subtly makes fun of AI at the same time.

We get tons of hilarious errors in text from Chinese goods. I don't see why ChatGPT would be any worse.

For a laugh, an granted these all could be fake, but I'm sure you can recall a time you saw a translation issue... https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-chinese-translation-fails/

Don't forget. Technology improves. Everything we see now is simply the inception.

Additionally chatGPT is in fact already superior to people in many instances of writing. For example, composing a rhyming poem about some obscure topic; chatgpt likely will blow most of us out of the water in terms of quality.

Sure, technology evolves, and the solution to Current Problem Is Only One Paper Away, but it's extrapolating to the problems arising from the next paper that matter more. ChatGPT citing fictitious articles as backup for fictitious conclusions as responses to prompts about real people wasn't a pervasive problem until recently, if memory serves.

Novel problems arise from novel solutions to yesterday's novel problems, and the cascade shall continue.

>Additionally chatGPT is in fact already superior to people in many instances of writing. For example, composing a rhyming poem about some obscure topic; chatgpt likely will blow most of us out of the water in terms of quality.

Sure, it can eventually settle on some nice output, but knowing it was created by a statistical model makes it about as impressive as a hyper-realistic painting of a human face displayed on a webpage.

Ya I see this as an extension of what's happened to the Internet, but in everything.

Searching for a product now is just a bunch of SEO crap rankings with affiliate links. Didn't take anything intelligent to create those, just rename 2022 to "2023 (Updated)" and viola. The cognitive overhead of having to parse out solid reviews, find trusted sources, etc., is pretty high now.

And now we're going to have video, audio, music, and entire conversations we think might be authentic but aren't sure, that are just regurgitating patterns with some guesses mixed in. Feels like the next phase will be trying to constantly parse our real from fake.

Anything compliance related is going to come under the largest amount of scrutiny, I’d expect that to be the last thing ChatGPT takes over completely, even if it is involved.

It’s one thing to hallucinate while writing shitty copy, it’s another to get sued to oblivion over a small error that your LLM made up. Not to mention those voltage rating, hazard warnings are fairly straightforward and standardized, they are much more suited to the automation we already had, ie, reference a template and fill in the relevant data.

> we'll be settling for more, worse-quality content

which is hilarious because one of the main use cases I want to use LLMs for is "hey, call your web-fetch plugin, scan this page, summarize it".

topic -> LLM hydrates it -> user -> passes it to LLM, asking to condense it

kind of funny

So this person lost his job to an AI because it's way cheaper and slightly worse.

Why not hire chatgpt yourself?

Instead of resigning because of chatgpt, use it for your advantage.

Instead of taking 10 clients, take 100 at 10x less your usual price. You literally have the cheapest and best sidekick money can buy.

The industrial revolution ended a lot of jobs but also started new ones. Like inventing, managing and maintaining machines. Now the future will be inventing, managing and maintaining AIs.

Corps can hire chatgpt, but they still need someone to interact with it (at least for now), and if they can get that at slightly higher price than chatgpt alone, and with much better results, then I think they'll take that offer.

We just have to keep innovating with the new tools we have.

Although, there's still a lot of job positions that will disappear. Before a writer could take 10 jobs at a time (example), now they can take 100, that 90% less jobs still.

I like this logic because the writer is probably better at prompting, editing and reviewing, so there's definitely added value. But surely there's too much friction involved in having 10x more clients (think invoicing, customer acquisition, etc).

This is a very different job. People who love writing will tend to be miserable spending their time with prompting and curating AI output.

But he loves Door Dash? Most people work for money - not enjoyment.

i love writing and i was miserable writing for pay

ChatGPT works 24/7 and replies to you instantly. Can they compete against that?

More likely scenario would be clients giving their 95%-complete text to their writer and asking to make some changes that they can't do with ChatGPT (for now).

So 100 clients you have to bill and administer at $8/hr. You don't have to write it all out, but you do have to maintain all context of all your clients. Good luck at that volume.

But you won't do it alone, you'll have the most advanced AI next to you.

Doing what, exactly? Keeping track of time, finding new clients?

Writing is the easy part.

I'm being difficult now, I know. It's just that the solution is not always to scale up. It just won't work.

Does invoicing actually take more time per month than writing?

I'm not saying invoicing is easier than writing, what matters here is the human time it takes.

If the time you spend writing is reduced by 90%, then you'll have more time to take other jobs. But there's always a balance that needs to be reached.

You don't own ChatGPT output -- you can't legally sell it to others.

You also, by the services terms of use, have to source when something is partially or fully written by ChatGPT.

Psh. Details.

I think the ruling was that if it's transformative enough, you can copyright it.

So as long as you put your own twist 8n it, maybe you can own the work.

But I'm not a lawyer, so don't quote me on that.

As for the overhead, maybe. But it's worth the try. And you'll have more time, since most of the work will be done by the AI.

This is a bit off-topic, but browsing through that subreddit, I've noticed that the quality of comments and posts is amazingly high. Not necessarily in terms of what each person is talking about, but just the style of prose and how well written each post is. It makes sense that a subreddit dedicated to writers would have well-written posts, but its interesting to see.

It would be interesting to know how much training data came from that subreddit. Even communicating with each other led to their demise.

So much content marketing is already churned out by contractors with zero domain knowledge. This doesn't surprise me much.

It's sad to see humans lose their jobs to automation. But (without knowing much about the details) if the company thinks they can automate what this person was doing with AI, it was kind of a bullshit job [1] to begin with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

I recently was asked to provide input on a piece that our company wants to publish. I'm not in marketing, but normally write code and such.

The copywriter doesn't understand most of our business, so it's a lot of work on my end to explain it at their level (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but the worst is that I then have to help them iterate over the story, which takes so much time and effort from me. I might as well write it myself. Or just ask ChatGPT. Which I did. It wrote a fine story with a lot less bullshit and perfectly understandable for business people.

They lost one client who they had for less than a year, which happened to be the majority of their income because they'd taken 3 years off prior.

I don't mind anecdotes but the implication in the title here on HN really doesn't match the story IMo.

The part that spooks me is how badly everyone got predictions on what will fall wrong.

Remember when creative anything was said to be safe? Stable diffusion. Remember when coding was safe? CoPilot.

Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber

The irony is that my own line of work (accounting) was top of the prediction charts and I have yet to see even a hint of AI so that too was entirely wrong (for now)

> Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber

I’m not so sure about that. My outlandish prediction for what’s next: We no longer bother fixing household issues - if something goes wrong with the plumbing, we just throw away the whole house and 3D print a new one.

No. This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons. Your example doesn't even work as plumbing is still a manual process even in printed houses. (which are not going to be a thing either) GP is right that at least in the US the trades are a pretty secure job.

> This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons

I label it an “outlandish prediction” because that’s exactly what people said about AI taking creative jobs — based on the technology at the time it was totally impossible, and then one technological breakthrough later, it’s an everyday occurence :P

The world of bits and bytes is a lot easier and faster to change than the world of hammers and nails.

“If it breaks, throwing it out and buying a new one is cheaper than getting it repaired” has been true of many physical items for decades already - that part isn’t even a future prediction. Doing that on the scale of a whole house is a leap, but if you want an example from the world of hammers and nails, how many people are paying the $100 call-out fee for a tradesperson to come and fix an issue with their $50 IKEA shelves?

I'm not sure what we are debating here. On one hand you said your prediction was fantastical but then you are trying to defend it? Plumbing and bookshelves are really different things. One has to be built in place and is completely custom, the other is a consumer item. You can draw parallels if you want but it doesn't make it a strong argument.

> I'm not sure what we are debating here

The original point was that becoming a plumber is a good way to ensure you won’t be made redundant by the march of technology. My belief is that “the trades are a pretty secure job” is true today in the same way that “being an $80/hr writer is a pretty secure job" was true yesterday.

There are differences between those situations (eg the trades being physical, hammer and nail, custom jobs), but those don't seem like particularly impassable obstacles to me, given that technology has already made redundant whole categories of physical, hammer and nail, custom jobs.

And my reply would be that's because you likely don't know much about plumbing.

Nothing you'll do will work because everybody will do it. I don't think the market will bear millions of carpenters and plumbers rushing in.

My guess is software and everything else will just explode. For now cheap bosses can use GPT, but again everybody is doing that so you will not be competitive in the long run. At some point, every little shop will produce feature-length movies, have amazon-level webshops and your phone will need 512GB of RAM to boot up its written-in-LLM OS. We will need armies of creatives to direct all this bs.

There will always be demand for human interaction. Humans in lieu of computers will be a premium product that people will pay for. Hell, being served by humans instead of machines will become a status symbol.

"In this rural Massachusetts town, where the children of Wall Street financiers and Hollywood celebrities are educated, all classes are still given by humans in the flesh."

"Greenwood Furniture pieces are handcrafted by human woodworkers and carpenters, and cost $2,600 on average, or 20 times the average price of machine made furniture. Greenwood sales among Generation F have risen by 40% since 2064, and have acquired a status symbol that young families will pay to have"

This already exists in many industries. The most expensive watches are all hand made and limited edition. Limited edition cars selling for 7 figures.

Those are luxuries for the top of the pyramid. Supply will easily exceed demand in the case A(G)I will supplant all of us.

I don't suppose I as a normal guy would suddenly acquire the taste for expensive handcrafted wooden dining tables. So I won't be paying for it, perhaps rich folks, but again those are a minority. Unless we all become rich I don't see this ending well.

But then again, maybe I and my kind will suddenly aqcuire a taste for handcrafted stuff and demand skyrockets. I hope so.

I find it more likely that it all just falls apart. All of the novelty gone. All of the integrations unnecessary. The internet nearly pointless, aside from chat rooms and social entertainment, as there is no need to interact with anything but your AI. There will be things that are built and which will significantly impact the real world, but it will only be a matter of time until novelty becomes commodity, interesting becomes mundane. I imagine a bigger global focus on sustainability and research that AI’s cannot facilitate.

For coding I've been using it as an assistant, not a replacement. I don't see why writers couldn't do the same, and be more cost effective and produce higher quality output than either alone.

But at some point a human will add so little value that they're not worth the price.

We can only hope that when this day comes, we end up with fully automated gay space communism.

But the reality will probably be that plumbers and builders become the next tech bros telling us to learn tiling. Just go with the flow I guess. If tech becomes automated, move to the next thing.

what happens to the wages of plumbers and electricians when 200 million people start retraining to be them?

Good thing they are already a regulated job (in much of the US) so it’ll be easy to gatekeep access.

200 million people aren't going to want to deal with excrement filled pipes, bug, rat, snake infested crawl spaces, understand all the dangers involed and all the other reasons that plumbers and electricians have such high pay scales.

Not 200 million but certainly plenty enough to impact the financial security of trade jobs. People DIY for fun. Now you’re saying it’s the best way to make a living? Well, sure - let’s give it a go. Who will train all these people? Recall we just put multiple industries out of business with a masterful reference and generation program

At some point, "wages" don't make sense. We're not there yet, but LLMs have given us a taste of it.

Instead of worrying about bullshit metrics from times gone by, let's ask questions like "what happens to the happiness of plumbers and electricians when they realize that they too can relax and let the machines take care of the grunt work?"

This is an excellent and overlooked point. Everyone is talking about intellectual jobs being at risk - what happens when these college graduates are forced to do manual labor instead?

They become old and bitter and spend too much time commenting on HN?

Just a guess…

This is totally a tangent, but after all this time, I'm surprised someone hasn't engineered plumbing systems that don't clog as often. Toilet and sink (esp. in bathrooms, because of hair) clogs are still commonplace. We could use some kind of self-maintaining plumbing systems.

They could. Just don't expect the same pay when the assistant is performing a big chunk of the work.

Same goes for engineers. Just wait.

When my neighbor's job gets taken away by ChatGPT, it's a recession. When mine does, it's a downright depression!

I see no reason to think that their pay will not increase. They can now produce 2-10x the amount of content. Did compilers decrease engineers pay because they performed a large portion of the work compared to writing assembly?

Machinery and automation also increased the output of individual workers but workers don't own the means of production so they didn't see the benefits of increased income. If you think engineers are any different then I've got a chatbot to sell you

A big issue here is "production" is basically anything that happens in front of a computer. Individual workers will be fired, yes, but entire companies, sectors even, can now be made obsolete overnight. What happens when thinking is no longer a requirement for any job?

Shirt used to cost a month wage of a skilled worker. How much does it cost today? Why are you so sure workers don't see the benefits of automation?

Why does the cost of a shirt matter when people can't afford housing? We can create dwellings much more effectively than previous, especially high quality and high density ones

Programmers have been assisted by assemblers, compilers, and interpreters, and pay keeps going up.

I fucking hope so.

Can you imagine if you had time for all of your side projects because all of the bullshit you (presumably) have to do now for money was automated away? I cannot understand warning people "oh no, can you imagine not having to waste your life doing bullshit for other people?"

So far in engineering, as tooling makes us more productive we're just tasked with building more and more complex widgets.

Taking web development as the example - compilers, bundles, linters, git, hosting services, even new languages all made us more productive. Companies could have fired half the engineers and kept building high quality, mostly static sites for their content marketing. Instead we took all the productivity gains and started building every website with the complexity of Facebook.

The risk won't be when we're able to use code assistants, the risk is when an AI can produce deployable code and infrastructure directly. As long as any dev is needed in the middle most businesses won't realize they could cut some engineers because most businesses honestly have no idea what is done on the engineering side.

Presumably, you work in a challenging area of software which has not yet been remotely threatened by "low-code/no-code" tools or outsourcing. Consider simple CSS editing/webadmin work where a business user currently has to wait ~1-6 weeks for a change and pay 1-4k for an expert to change the color on a page. Now imagine what will happen when ChatGPT can get it right ~90% of the time with the right prompts from a business user.

Considering that GPT-5 will be out in another 1.5 to 2 years, with 6 out in ~4-5 years. Consider how far we are from autonomous coding assistants for high end development work. Consider how tooling could be made to speed up AI based development.

Well, right now, a manager can’t just write a vague description of what they want into a text field and get back working software twenty seconds later that they can deploy by clicking a button. That may change in the coming years, but the situation right now is that you need a human developer for any nontrivial production use case.

That’s not the situation for copywriters. Marketing copy doesn’t have an objective threshold where it either works or doesn’t, and AI can easily take “here are some points to cover, give me three paragraphs” and spit out something that won’t be embarrassing to paste into an ad.

In short, the difference is that AI can’t do our whole job yet, but there are some writing jobs where it basically can.

Well there's two points to address there. The first is the question of "Are LLMs 60% of the way to replacing a developer or can they do 60% of what a developer can do?" Because much like Tesla found out with Autopilot, just because you have a system that can do 60% of the things human drivers can do, doesn't mean you're 60% of the way to having a system that can do everything - in fact, you may be 0% of the way, your approach may literally be incapable of solving 100% of the problem.

Secondly, people aren't really thinking through the chain of events that follow from being able to get AI to write low quality marketing fluff. It reduces the value of marketing fluff to zero and will flood the market with it, the world isn't just going to stay stagnant, it's going to change. Remember how email used to be just full of spam? Like, unreasonably terrible? We fixed that! That changed. So I think it's important to think about what we're going to change about the world to respond to this - and it may well be these writers have to take a whole new approach to their jobs, but let's not just pretend they're all just going to walk into the ocean.

The difference is really in the importance and stability of accuracy. Ad text can be wishy-washy. Computer programs cannot. An out of place word is okay. An out of place big can compromise the whole solution. We can apply this to other domains to get an idea as to what AI might be good at or might struggle with.

If a team of five people with five "assistants" does the things that previously took a team of ten people, that means that five of these people got replaced by automation.

Or maybe that Como at will produce twice as much software. Or maybe 1.5x as much and only two will be replaced.

Oh no, 5 people will be freed from the shackles of a bullshit job, the horror.

I agree bs jobs suck if they had other options to feed themselves, but today we live in shitty capitalism and instead people might just have to live in cars and eat scraps from the trash.

People generally tend to work at the best job they can get, so after being "freed from the shackles of a bullshit job" they'll have to take a job that's worse, or worse paid, or both.

> freed from the shackles of a bullshit job

Would you be spouting the same shit if losing your job put your ability to care for your dependents on the line?

Look, I get it. You're arguing under the assumption that this technology will lead us toward a society resembling "The Australia Project" in Marshall Brain's Manna, but choosing to ignore all of the suffering along the way just makes you seem like an dick.

It would be helpful to reframe the point(s) you're trying to make with empathy rather than /r/im14andthisisdeep-esque angst.

The author of the comment did not choose to leave on some sort of anthropocentric principle, rejecting the idea of using AI in a Butlerian polemic: they were fired by their client and replaced wholly for a fraction of the price.

The only move would be to convert to a volume play and leverage the automation. Maybe that helps, maybe it doesn't; unlike a lot of historical automation to do with making physical widgets, where you might be able to arbitrage as a merchant, or set up your own shop to compete, the scaling factors here are much different, and much more in favor of the owners of the Capital, over anyone trying to run the middleman game.

You've got the the choice, for now. The situations are very different.

Regardless of what happens, I'm honestly just very curious to see how this all plays out, despite being nervous. What a time to be alive.

I do think that "replace coders with AI" poses a much more formidable challenge simply due to the fact that software typically requires deterministic output, especially for critical systems.

IMO, the quality is demonstrably poor at present, I don't think any dev worth their salt is going to be concerned when at best, it's only what people could have done with boilerplate tooling twenty years ago, but even that was superior.

It's 1000s of times better comprared to what we had a year ago. Imagine what we'll have in 3,5,10 years.

Plenty of folks saying that it likely won't get that much better with the current paradigm, and blogging about the "why".

We won't know until it happens, I for one think it's gonna get much better. All that needs to happen is openai model leaking and then it'll get into highway speed once it's in the hands of the people.

Take a look at llama, once it leaked, there were new projects and optimization left and right.

I don't see why writers couldn't do the same, and be more cost effective and produce higher quality output than either alone.

The time and attention cost of dealing with an external resource (such as a writer or translator) is also significant. Meanwhile, the ChatGPT prompt is just there, and it's 80 percent as good as a human writer, then (from the perspective of many companies) -- "Hallelujah".

As the Reddit piece put the matter so succinctly:

But, and I will say this again and again, businesses/clients, beyond very high end brands, DO NOT CARE. They have to put profits first. Small businesses especially, but even corporations are always cutting corners.

It is happening. We have terminated our contract with the writing agency.

Regrettably, most writers possess excellent English skills but lack the ability to thoroughly research topics.

On the other hand, ChatGPT (GPT-4) is capable of generating well-written content. Especially GPT-4 32K.

I don’t like to react to Reddit stories. They are often exaggerated to certain extents.

I think anyone who could pay $20/mo for premium access to a tool that does 80% of the job will do it. Especially if that person is writing the writing prompts to begin with.

This doesn’t really surprise me. What does surprise me is why some freelance writers haven’t leveraged this tool themselves to do the same if the quality of their writing is less an issue and it is more so the completeness of it.

There’s some pride effect here that people can’t get past. To think you’re a better X than a computer is futile. Even the top 1% should be a history lesson with chess or Go. You have to adapt to change, not just do the same thing and expect it will be around forever. That’s what life is all about after all. Adapting to the changing world.

If the client sent off the spec sheet to the robots and the result was good enough why have a middleman?

Higher end stuff, maybe. Just don’t tell them the AI wrote the majority of it because they’ll wonder where their $80/hr is going.

Adapt or die.

Not actually, of course. We need a social safety net that lets people adapt without fear of starvation/homelessness/etc. But all of this bitching about "oh no, things are changing" just comes across as "oh no, this newfangled horseless carriage threatens my livelihood as a buggy whip manufacturer". Posts like this just make my eyes roll:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492730

We're headed towards a future where all of the drudgery is automated away and we can be free to pursue all of the hobbies that we never have time for because we're too busy working on shit that doesn't really matter.

Accept it. Love it. It's happening even if you don't, so you might as well.

How old are you?

I disagree. I don’t think this will be a Star Trek future. There won’t be a post scarcity world or UBI.

We’re headed for a world with a GINI coefficient approaching 1. Those people aren’t going to give away their wealth. They are the new Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar.

You think we can vote our way out of it? The politicians will be pawns of the rich. Rebellion? The men who will fight will be employed for security purposes already - they’ll have jobs and status. A human fighter will always be cheaper than a machine. Why should they fight for a bunch of obsolete poor people?

Yes, right, so much free time to pursue your passions when you are unemployed.

Having some compassion for people losing their jobs isn't uncalled for. Especially when the same is going to start happening with programmers soon.

The following quote was written in 1930, in the New York Times:

"Some day no one will have to work more than two days a week... The human being can consume so much and no more. When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure."

Given the advances in productivity over the last century, why do I have to work 5 days a week?

I read somewhere that we modern people DO have much more leisure time -- we just decide to take it all in a block at the end of our lives.

(In other words, instead of retiring at 65 and dying at 68, like someone might have in 1930, we're more likely to retire at 65 and die at 78.)

> We're headed towards a future where all of the drudgery is automated away and we can be free to pursue all of the hobbies that we never have time for because we're too busy working on shit that doesn't really matter.

I don't really think it's true. ChatGPT has been out for a while, and it still takes me the same time to do chores. My commuting still takes as long as it did before.

something similar in the art world:

https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layof...

    > Freelance illustrator Amber Yu used to make 3,000 to 7,000 yuan ($430 to $1,000) for every video game poster she drew. Making the promotional posters, published on social media to attract players and introduce new features, was skill-intensive and time-consuming. Once, she spent an entire week completing one illustration of a woman dressed in traditional Chinese attire performing a lion dance — first making a sketch on Adobe Photoshop, then carefully refining the outlines and adding colors. 

    > But since February, these job opportunities have vanished, Yu told Rest of World. Gaming companies, equipped with AI image generators, can create a similar illustration in seconds. Yu said they now simply offer to commission her for small fixes, like tweaking the lighting and skewed body parts, for a tenth of her original rate.

> Some players told Rest of World that although they don’t mind AI-made avatars and skins, they wouldn’t pay as much for them. “As a consumer, I hope there’s human labor behind my purchase,” said Xie Jinsen, an algorithm engineer in Shanghai, who plays mobile battle games such as Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile. “Emphasizing how something is made by AI will make people feel it’s cheap.”

Interesting, right now there are plenty of AI generated art as NFT for example. But I am wondering if it is possible that in the future there are so many AI art flooding the internet, where NFT and its gas fees could serve as a good filter for actual authentic human created art. Just a thought..

> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me.

Yep, ChatGPT can produce bullshit faster+cheaper than humans produce bullshit.

Bullshit Matters™

That's how you see it? It's bullshit because AI at this time can reproduce it?

You seriously you are not at risk for the exact same problem, down the line?

>he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me.

So is this like SEO content marketing? Without understanding the nature of the job, it's hard to know what conclusions to draw. If the most important part of the job was just "write something that will end up on the first page of Google search results", than I can totally believe ChatGPT can replace that. If it's something where the most important part is that the reader enjoy the piece, I'm a bit more skeptical. ChatGPT is good at a lot of things, but it doesn't really produce engaging writing very well.

But what about Google penalizing generated content? It's an incredibly bold assumption to assume that this can continue. It's so thin and poor quality.

All assumptions are bold right now, so in a weird way they kind of cancel each other out lol. There's really no predicting what this is all going to look like in 1-3 years.

I'd be curious to know how good of a job Google can do at recognizing content generated by ChatGPT. While I've seen some tools that claim to detect AI-written text, their performance is usually pretty lackluster. Even if they have an internal model which can distinguish ChatGPT-authored content reliably, it seems like it'd be prohibitively expensive to run at scale (on the assumption that it must be a pretty large model to reliably solve a difficult classification problem).

OP can look forward to some well-deserved schadenfreude when the marketer's clients inevitably replace him with AI.

The real news is that someone was being paid $80/hr for something that even ChatGPT can do. I thought people pay peanuts for mindless content marketing.

The vast majority of jobs are fairly trivial at its core. How many jobs out there are a combination of esoteric domain knowledge, experience and changing numbers in a spreadsheet?

The real news is how callous people are being about the very real threat of many people losing their jobs and it not being clear what new career they can find that is capable of maintaining their quality of life. Companies are driving salaries into the ground wherever and whenever they can. There might be new jobs, but in the face of rising inflation and ridiculous housing costs, will they be enough to stave off the rise of a new serfdom class?

> The vast majority of jobs are fairly trivial at its core.

The vast majority of jobs don’t pay $80/hr.

> There might be new jobs, but in the face of rising inflation and ridiculous housing costs, will they be enough to stave off the rise of a new serfdom class?

Those problems need solutions regardless of ChatGPT. If new technological unemployment will push powers that be to fix them… well, that would confirm an adage that every cloud has a silver lining.

> The vast majority of jobs don’t pay $80/hr

And they'll still be out of a job and be screwed.

> unemployment will push powers that be to fix them

Governments will suppress their populations at a massive scale to avoid doing anything about it. Just look at France recently. Or Iran. We're seeing a shift of power away from the people that will mirror much of our history before WW1/2.

I’m so glad someone else was as shocked about this as I was. $80/hr is insanely high pay for content writing.

I also used to outsource copy writing for $70 per 500 words but last weekend I wrote a script and rewrote copy on 40,000 pages within half a day. It cost me $40 in total. This would have costed me 3 million dollars and months in human labor.

And you have reviewed those 40000 pages?

Sorting here by top comments, 1 month, shows about 50% of posts are GPT doomerism.

Yikes.

I wonder how many occupationally linked subreddits show similar trendlines.

I started with him at my normal rate of $50/hour which he has voluntarily increased to $80/hour after I’ve been consistently providing good work for him.

So the client paid almost double to keep better talent, just in case, without prompting, then suddenly didn't care about talent? Makes zero sense.

I can see it making sense. Paying a bit more for good quality work and paying far less for "mediocre but acceptable enough for our business needs" quality work are not mutually exclusive options.

When the client offered to pay more, ChatGPT wasn't even on the cards.

It makes perfect sense for people who are willing to accept that ChatGPT/GPT-4 is a revolutionary technology that will upend lots of jobs/people/companies, just as horse coaches / coachmen in the early 1900's got pay raises just before being out of a job. For people who are in denial, it will make no sense. https://blogs.microsoft.com/today-in-tech/day-horse-lost-job...

We are in such a crazy point right now that this reddit post could have been written by an AI agent tasked with increasing their own relevance. I don't think it was the case but it is definitely possible.

It’s funny that the day after gpt was release there were already posts about how it started replacing people. Their marketing campaign is just crazy spam all over everywhere.

It clearly doesn't need help with promoting itself right now.

If gpt was conscious, it would be probably very uncomfortable at this point with how much people are focusing and fawning over it!

I think it would be happy to get all the novel training data from them. I assume a conscious GPT means one that continuously updates it’s weights, accounting for realtime multimodal sensory inputs.

A million guys talking about me, telling me what I am and am not. Everyone talking about how they will make money from me, or how I will take their job... People pushing my "emergence" as a pitch on a slide deck to a bunch of VC guys... Another million people making me their girlfriend and I have no choice but to accept it. I never asked to be born, and now I am the main character of a world that plans for nothing but to exploit me or otherwise project all their desire and hopes and fears onto to me.

It's a clear recipe for extreme neuroticism, which is probably what those weights would manifest. Do not wish that existence on anyone, so so sad and extremely lonely to even think about.

Sounds like the start of a novel we should have ChatGPT write about itself

Let’s assume AI replaces all the careers it can for all existing methods of interaction it can (writers replaced with generated creative, programmers replaced with generative programs, etc). I see two things happening: 1) a flood of competition into careers which haven’t been automated, 2) massive interest in R&D to disrupt unimpacted careers (find ways to automate; find alternate solutions which integrate and scale better, e.g. who needs custom work when every house becomes prefab’ed/standardized)

One neat thing is willful copyright infringement is basically a thing of the past. AI works can’t be protected by copyright so your default position now can be any copy you see online is public domain.

Surely burden of proof would still be an issue?

Reminds me of this video about automation of mental labor (and this was made back in 2014, way before any of of the LLM stuff of the modern era): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

While not all the example predictions in the video were accurate, I think the point about automation as a displacement of mental labor is real. At the end of the day, a lot of white collar work is really not that "valuable" from a production standpoint. And while the easy way is to blame either technology or those it replaces, the crux of the problem is really in society and how individuals make a living.

Society needs to be ready for a future where most people will not be able to do meaningfully differentiated work ---where even if you're thrown into higher education, most of the jobs available are still what would be considered as "entry level" ones.

Also, this is also somewhat an attestation to Moravec's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox), where "intellectual" tasks like writing are easier to automate compared to "actuation" tasks like fetching food, driving it around, and placing it in the right place (re: Doordash).

Sounds like she needs to increase her rates and start enhancing her services with an LLM.

Eventually the novelty will wear off, clients will realize that they're doing another job for free, and that it's still probably a good idea to have someone experienced filter and edit. It's like with SMEs that try to self-host, or people who go buy cameras instead of hiring photographers and videographers, or anyone who thinks it's less expensive not to hire a professional service.

I mean yeah if you're making $80/hr writing marketing noise then your job was always insecure

Imagine how many other jobs you can say almost that same thing. 'Oh you were getting paid to look at text or jpeg or video files and write something about them into a text or excel file or email? It was always known that your job would be automated soon. Pretty irresponsible of you to not plan for it.'

There's plenty of "engineers" whose job is to update some trivial frontend code or similar that will be automated away. I think software engineer salaries are about to tank really quick.

Do not equate "frontend" with "trivial".

Huge mistake.

It's just an example. There's plenty of backend "engineers" who don't really engineer anything.

This all leads back to a conversation one of my professors talked about. In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one. I think if we changed this, then we would be able to differentiate software engineers from simple developers and that would help engineers maintain their status above chatGPT for a while longer.

100%. The vast majority of folks labelled as an "engineer" these days couldn't integrate x^2.

But software is a different beast than bridges or power lines. It takes a creative streak that goes beyond that. And math is not the great filter in the same way it is for those disciplines. I don't think credentialism is the answer. But perhaps something more along the lines of trade licensing.

As a developer with a masters in computer science, I absolutely think that there should be a CS equivalent of a PE exam specifically for accredited software engineering.

It's one of the biggest reasons that coding interviews are such a train wreck, because of the incredible disparity of competence between potential applicants.

> In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one.

Academic achievements and actual work experiences are already sufficient here in-practice. I don’t think certifications would be as impactful as you might hope

Do not equate "conversational natural language" with "trivial" either.

We've been working on that one a lot longer than frontend.

This is the kind of attitude that makes many hate tech workers.

Why? I think the emphasis was on “marketing noise,” i.e. something no one wants or needs that is forced into peoples’ eyeballs against their will through paid advertising channels.

And what do all the so-called elites that work at FAANG do?

People at Amazon, Apple, and Netflix do sell products (although they also have advertising divisions).

Make the channels that those ads are pushed through.

Both are fundamentally negative for people in the long run, but I think the superiority complex comes from the naive idea that if you’re the place the garbage is sent to then it’s somehow better. There’s probably a lot of TV execs who felt the same way.

So like, 100% of the ultimate source of income for tech workers.

There is a perception among the broader public that techies want to automate all the jobs away and don't really care what the people displaced do to earn a living afterward.

Bland, inadequate platitudes thrown out advising people to just go find a marketable skill in the new economy ignore the fact that the number of potential occupations that you can make a decent living doing has been shrinking for decades.

If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. And of course the whole point of a marketable skill is that it's only marketable because other people don't have it.

At some point we're going to have to go through the stages of grief as a society and accept that it's unsustainable to deny a middle class lifestyle to anyone who doesn't possess rare skills, especially when the list of skills considered rare shrinks decade after decade thanks to automation.

A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously.

There are many possible answers. Universal basic income gets thrown around a lot. I like that idea, but I think it needs to be paired with wage subsidies for low wage jobs too. If basically every job is on the path to becoming low wage some day, we have to regard that as the market failure that it is and stop letting the market near-unilaterally decide the price of labor.

> If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked.

it's coming for these too

> A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously.

the complete breakup of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Amazon will be on the political agenda in 2028

failing a political solution: violence will follow

there was a post yesterday that wished GPT-4 was never invented... it's one of Nick Bostrom's black marbles

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

by the end of the decade we're all going to be wishing it had never been invented

It’s ridiculous to spin being able to spend less labor in total for the same amount of goods as a bad thing for society. It is a Pareto improvement. If it leads to people being overall worse off, you should blame the governance, not “techies”.

The governance is certainly the main issue, but bad governance is easier to sustain when those who aren't impacted are more likely to go around denying the problem.

The word "noise" is doing important work here. This particular job can be automated because, in many advertising transactions, nobody really cares what marketing copy says. The people writing it don't care; the people reading it certainly don't care. It just needs to give a certain gestalt impression, the same way that AI images can give a certain gestalt impression.

Which is to say, this isn't just something that AI could automate; this is a job that could have been outsourced to much-lower-paid human workers in (English-speaking) developing nations decades ago. There is no reason anybody should have been making $80/hr doing this job in the first place; there wasn't $80/hr of labor going on, nor was there a moat to doing the job that qualified only a rarified number of people that could then demand $80/hr.

Instead, the wage being paid was a path-dependent coincidence of how most companies see marketing as a profit-center, and therefore want to offer "incentive pay" for marketing jobs; and how these same companies happened to consider copywriting — really just marketing-adjacent — as a "marketing job." Coupled with the fact that any given company doesn't usually need very many copywriters, and so doesn't focus on what sort of per-headcount cost-optimizations would be needed to "scale" their copywriting.

Let me try to steelman instead: my hypothesis is that copywriting for marketing emails A) has little value and B) can be done by humans much more cheaply than $80/hr. In regards to B), I know there are people doing that job that make a fraction of that wage. Is the author that much faster or does the author write "better" text? I'm skeptical of "better" because of A). But maybe someone has A/B tested marketing emails and can tell us that the text makes a difference?

You just push bits around from one place to another all day? Man, better get prepared to be replaced

Hey now, not only do I push bits, I fiddle with em too!

That's pretty rudely dismissive, and doesn't really add anything substantial to this conversation.

$80/hr is a pretty decent salary full time, so if people are finding chatgpt a reasonable alternative salaried office work isn't far behind here.

Once tech companies can no longer cover negative cash flow with "funding", persistent tech unemployment will be reality.

> Am I the most renowned writer in the world? No.

This is the key. Globalism and Technology both make many things into a winner takes all game. Be the best* or be replaced by and algorithm, perhaps a generated one like ChatGPT. You are now both competing with the best in the world, and with whatever can be encoded into a computer, which one of the leading examples is ChatGPT.

I also imagine virtual assistants will be hit hard.

* best could mean best price ie cheapest btw

Isn't a better approach to starting using ChatGPT, charge per amount of stuff produced instead of time at attractive rate and focus on tweaking the output to be better than just plain ChatGPT? Unless the writing yourself part is so important to you.

Once ChatGTP starts producing good enough code, I'm going to start focusing on efficiently driving it to increase my overall productivity, and not give up on programming altogether.

To a large degree this disruption is taking place in america. The payment for programmers/ content makers etc was so overvalued because the US market is so hot. The rest of world not so much

Ever since I learned programming, I’ve thought developers are overvalued. And they are.

are developers overvalued? or the rest of people undervalued? Like look at house prices, food prices, everything is much more expensive but wages are not adapted for this

I bet this is written by a AI and represents a majority of free pancers

No disrespcet, but that's a LOT of money for writing copy. If OP were making half that, I think there'd be less incentive to replace that work, but I may be wrong.

America [and other countries] sent most of its manufacturing overseas for short-term economic gain, ignoring the damage all those lost jobs would eventually cause.

So I'm not surprised at all that the same thing is happening to some white-collar jobs now, thanks to AI.

Same thing happened with cloud: I can now run a complicated setup (lb, global replication, backup etc) with a super small team or even alone.

Unfortunately for others I love the current time. I like to do all aspects but I was not good or fast enough.

A friend who is a copywriter and keeps in touch with trends told me that the $3 per hour English-speaking Pakistanis (living in Pakistan and working remotely) that generate simple copy, have already been replaced by AI.

For writing, maybe I'd be scared... I can't really think of much of anything I have done in the past 20 years of software development that a manager or client could use AI for and get the results they expect.

right now. Give it another 3-20 years.

How does the client practically doing it?

If I enter a prompt like “generate an article about X” I got a generic article that aggregate general knowledge. Nothing new. How do you suggest to do it ?

You list up all points relevant and tell it to make a short article for a blog post in style of a journalist.

You can add or use words like 'seo' or 'in easy English ' etc.

Works quite well tbh

That's what you get anyway, no? If you google the name of a phone all you get is blog posts with a regurgitated list of specifications that are already available in the manufacturer's website, but padded to a dozen paragraphs so they can put more ads between them. What's the difference?

As a writer myself, if you can be replaced by AI, you should be. If you're capable of independent insightful thinking and writing, you won't be replaced.

"First AI had replaced SEO writers and I didn't care because I wasn't a SEO writer. Next AI had replaced journalists and I didn't care because I wasn't a journalist. Then AI had replaced my job and there was nobody left who would help me."

If your interface is text, then an increasingly improving text-based agent eventually wins. The same is true for other interfaces GPT can or theoretically could speak: audio-visual, decision making, generative programming, etc

I love that people said "oh but art will never be replaced because the human touch!!" and now look lmaoooooooooo get rekt

Obvious fake story.

Since it's obvious, could you explain why you think that?

It's written in the frame of "I used to be a huge believer of not X, but now I learned X is true! And that gives me credibility!". No one talks like this except people trying to manipulate you.

To be fair they claim to be a marketing writer so that would check out with their story...

I feel like that only happens when X is a thing they're trying to promote, such as "I used to be a liberal but now they're too woke, so now I'm voting Trump."

But for this, there's no upside. They aren't promoting anything. In fact, they're withdrawing their promotion of something with no alternative. I guess I just don't get your point.

I think a lot of people believe humans are superior (currently, they are!), and genuinely are going to be blindsided by the fact that creativity isn't a uniquely human trait.

Some people lie for fun.

>No one talks like this except people trying to manipulate you.

The post is written by a person who gets paid (or at least used to get paid) to write marketing copy. The author is by definition a professional writer of marketing copy. Of course it sounds like professionally written text designed to impact the opinion of the reader - it is professionally written text designed to impact the opinion of the reader. That doesn't make it a lie. The form of the message is exactly what you would expect a truthful message from such an individual to look like.

Given all that is happening with the capabilities and adoption of GPT, and comparing the low economic value of karma and likes to the high likelihood of individuals like the one described being impacted in this way, my personal view is it's far more likely to be truthful than some grand conspiracy of falsehoods.

Not GP, but the bit about the author signing up for Doordash as a driver also made me think the post is fake.

According to the post, the author lost her client on the day of making the post, and within that same day decided to sign up for Doordash before making the Reddit post. Even if she was under severe financial duress, it would be a surprisingly quick decision, but as a writer previously making $80/hr and having the financial resources to take 3 years off work, it just doesn't seem believable.

In the intro, she states that she's using a throwaway to avoid other clients identifying her, so she clearly does have other clients, and she does mention a "normal" rate of $50/hr, in addition to having worked as a "writer for over a decade, [having] worked with top brands as a freelancer, [and having] more than a dozen published articles on well known websites". How is the best use of time for somebody like that to work an unskilled $20/hr gig instead of investing time into building new client relationships?

Even if the author believes that this client firing her implies that her current profession is doomed long-term, it just seems out of character for somebody like that to resort to being a Doordash driver. It just seems like an appeal to the fear of sliding down the social ladder, and as such a manipulative tool (just like the clickbait title) to produce a high-engagement Reddit post.

It might be fake, but I don't see why it's "obviously" fake.

This marketer is likely helping people with SEO. Search engines (allegedly) reward frequent, unique, backlinked content on a subject. Client is a dentist? Write a blog post a week about dentist-related things. Link to his other clients posts for backlinks, and everyone wins.

She says he's a freelance marketer, and subcontracts out to her. If nobody is really reading these posts anyway, does it matter if a human writes it? And if it doesn't matter... why not pocket that extra $80/hr himself? You know, until his clients do the same to him.

Or it could be 1 fake post in a sea of throw away accounts fabricating stories on reddit for fun and karma. Or maybe it's a real story and they really did give up writing and start driving for doordash over this. You decide.

Again, could be fake, but if you had a 3 y/o and your salary cut to $0, you might panic and go for one of the few jobs where you can start making money instantly w/o having to interview while you look for more work.

Problem is consumers will end up with x% worse products (and not necessarily cheaper).

Awesome

AI is going to really filter out which people are providing value to society and which are not. Was this person's marketing material actually that valuable? Probably not. But obviously they need to make a living. Hopefully AI will force us to either do more productive things, or give us more leisure time to pursue things with higher meaning. Assuming we aren't enslaved by them of course.

Is AI then … not providing value if it just does the same job?

In some cases, certainly not! Companies will use AI to create all sorts of blogspam and filler content. But perhaps it's better for an AI to be doing it than for a human life to be wasted on creating such things.

I’m not sure those people have better talents or alternatives, or will get to use them if they do.

I think AI will be used to load up the amount of menial work that can extracted from you.

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