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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

I think there's more than that. As someone who has written millions of words in my life, I agree with you - the mechanical transformation of my ideas is not the hard part. However, there will be people who haven't developed their own style or their own fluency in the mechanical transformation, and now they have the ability to do so almost as well as I can.

An expert reader will be able to tell the difference. But assume that these people have read and understand the subject but have not put the millions of words together yet.

At some point, it will become like a calculator. I can multiply 20% off a dinner bill faster than getting the calculator out, but people won't spend the time learning the mental math and they will do just as good a job.

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My off-the-cuff answer:

I am a decent writer and communicator.

It takes me a little while to get from a bulleted outline to a crisp couple of paragraphs.

I now use ChatGPT to do initial composition from the bulleted list, and then a first edit. Then I do final edits myself. It saves about half the time, and it feels like it saves more than half of the energy.

ChatGPT's revision of my answer:

I'm proficient in writing and communication, but I require some time to transform an outline into a concise and polished piece of writing. To streamline the process, I use ChatGPT for the initial draft and first edit, and do the final editing myself. This approach cuts down the time and effort required significantly.

Maybe those two versions mean the same thing in whatever idea vector space ChatGPT operates in, but ChatGPT's version is missing a lot. It didn't keep your "half the time, more than half the energy" bit, which I liked.

The former's informal and my default commenting voice. The latter is suitable for more uses.

I can pull it towards whatever voice and style I want.

> I ain't half bad at writing and talkin' to folks.

> I can whip up a decent couple of paragraphs from a list, but it takes me a bit of time.

> That's why I've enlisted the help of ChatGPT for my first draft and edit. Then I take over for the final touch-ups. It's a real time-saver and feels like it saves even more brain juice.

I do think that this is going to make it a LOT more difficult for people to build up the kind of experience that folks like you have.

The barrier to entry to the role just got a lot lower, but the barrier to gaining enough experience to become a specialist just dramatically jumped up

Yes exactly this, Stephen King will always be Stephen King. You can get chatgpt to generate something like Stephen King, but people know about him and his brand/style so it feels like cheap imitation.

Everyone else? They won't get the ability to establish their brand/style (assuming chatgpt gets faster at updating with recent information/sources).

I can see us relying far more on centralized institutions (again). Only reading from certain publishing houses, writers focusing more on trying to get into a certain house vs content of their work.

> I can see us relying far more on centralized institutions (again).

Yes. In an age of abundant junk, curation of the gems can be a successful strategy.

That is a theme in one of Niel Stephensons novels. He predicted the rise of incoherent rage inducing algorithms for profit. Even implied it would work exceptionally well on right wing rural religious people from middle America. People with money and taste paid for a custom feed, curated by humans.

We can add this to a growing list, along with Google earth and second life.

If the house has a quality criteria for entry, won't the writer have to focus on the content of their work in order to meet the criteria?

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