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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

> but those people won’t be “writers.”

Not by your definition maybe, but that misses the point made in the article:

> why did I conclude that 90% of my skills had become (economically) worthless?

The op has inserted a specific word here in braces because this isn't a question of what defines a writer, it's a question of who gets paid to write. By that definition, what defines a writer is not for you to decide, it's decided by the market. And the market, in my experience, is not particularly concerned with quality.

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> By that definition, what defines a writer is not for you to decide, it's decided by the market.

Nope. Writers write. Most writing is "economically worthless" — the number of novels that get written every year is astronomical versus the number that make money. If we were to let the market judge the quality of creative works, we'd be culturally fucked.

The writing skills that became worthless for this guy were the ones that weren't worth much to begin with.

> The writing skills that became worthless for this guy were the ones that weren't worth much to begin with.

Exactly. The market price for anything is determined by both demand and supply. The demand for good writing is relatively unchanged. The supply is also relatively unchanged. In the case prior to ChatGPT that demand and that supply were somewhat low, or as you say - not worth much to begin with.

Oh sure, there's always the Stephen King's and Tom Clancy's of the world, but guess what? They were always the exception anyway and they will continue to be. The same argument can be made for musicians.

> Stephen King's

Stephen King has written so much by now, his new books are basically remixed versions of his old books. Stephen King has become his own ChatGPT.

(No accident either - the guy is a writing machine - 30 pages a day, no breaks, that's over 50 200 page books a year...)

Those are interesting examples, in that they are both commercially successful despite conventionally poor writing. In literary circles, King is often regarded as somebody who could write well but chooses not to because it would be less lucrative. Clancy is bad enough that criticism seems unnecessary. AI could certainly write a Clancy-esque Dad Fantasy.

Considering Tom Clancy became Tom Clancy(tm) several years before he died, heavily using ghostwriters...

Shows how a prominent author becomes a brand. Tom Clancy isn't the only one. These authors are to their books as fashion designers are to their lines at mainstream retail outlets.

I agree with you wholly in reality, but we're not discussing the definition of writers, we're discussing a qualified definition of writers. The qualifier is "economic worth".

We're not disagreeing, you're just talking about something different than the topic of the OP.

The market is wide and diverse.

People who have money will always pay a premium for quality.

With regards to writing, if you can create quality information with AI faster than before, you will be more profitable.

If you are going wide, and throwing spaghetti at the wall with crappy writing, you may also be able to generate $1 from a million people vs. $10,000 from 100 people.

AI threatens the middle for sure, and will force all of us to change our strategies.

You have significantly more faith in the market than I.

> People who have money will always pay a premium for quality.

The assumption here is that the Venn of "people who have money" and "people who can recognise / care about quality" is closer to a circle than a figure eight - that has not been my experience.

It also assumes that quality can not be archieved with chat gpt via quantity. Like "Make me 20 webpages with this topic", then let them test & evaluate by amazon clickwork, then regenerate with the base of the best 3 till quality goal is reached.

Ha.

Well, yeah - I guess we're even calling into question the very definition of the word quality here. Your comment seems to imply that quality is a metric that correlates with quantitative metrics of mass appeal, rather than personal & individually diverse concepts of subjective quality, which would be more what I was referring to. But both can be equally valid given the context.

More importantly, it assumes that this week's LLM is the last one ever, ignoring the improvements and iterations we are seeing on what feels like an hourly basis.

This is also my opinion. AI will dig a huge gap which does not yet exist between the best and the worst products (articles, code, whatever your product is). People will only have to navigate in this new landscape filled with a huge majority of mediocre crap and a small minority of gems.

> AI will dig a huge gap which does not yet exist between the best and the worst products (articles, code, whatever your product is).

Google results and app stores are already filled with low-effort trash. If this gets worse, then the importance of "influencers"[1] as curators of the trash pile rise even more.

[1] Or YouTubers or whatever else you want to call them.

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