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Comment by pulvinar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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