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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

>If you’re really a writer, all that matters is the end result and I can guarantee you that people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a row will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day, but those people won’t be “writers.”

For a historical comparison, the same could be said of photography. You have to know instinctively what makes a great photograph if you're going to have a hope of making them on a regular basis, or for pay. The gear really doesn't matter much, it's just table stakes.

Having GPT spit out some new combinations of words can help you get around writers block, or expand your vocabulary, but I strongly agree it won't automatically make you a writer.

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Photography already did to painters what GPT may do to writers.

The wave of non figurative "modern art", can be seen as painters trying to find new markets.

This is a really interesting idea I hadn't thought of before.

Both modern art and abstract art trace their origins to the mid-1800s, which is contemporaneous with the development of photography techniques, but before the popularization of photography in the 1880s.

I wonder if the knowledge of photography could have helped spur the development of abstract art, rather than its wide adoption and economic effect.

One other thing to consider is that the starving artist predates photography - the "Bohemian artist" archetype was in full effect in Europe ahead of photography's popularization.

Photography is a great example here, because it seems pretty possible that generative models do to writing what smartphones did to photography.

Photographers are still doing photography for the same reasons we always were.

People who want to take pictures no longer need to be photographers.

I think it’s interesting to look at, but I think the parallels break down pretty quickly. The decline of legacy photographic equipment and the reduction of skill needed to take photos is all about a rather technical skillset becoming less and less necessary. The smartphone also made many other legacy things irrelevant for most people.

Language and writing are closer to the core of humanity in a rather existential way. It’s less clear that reducing the skillset required to participate in writing is a net benefit, even if it enables the generation of more text by people who might not have done so before.

Smartphones make a photographer’s job easier and a non-photographer’s goals possible. I worry that the same can’t be said for language models and the end result is likely to be closer to a new form of illiteracy than it is to the democratization of a process that formerly required greater degrees of technical skill.

When painting broad strokes, I see the similarity. Drilling down even a little widens the conceptual gap quite a bit.

I have already had to "intervene" on a developer that was writing bad code biased by the fact that he talked to chatGPT, and chatGPT can make tons and tons of bad code for you effortlessly. (The intervention was basically asking "why did you write that? did that function win you anything?")

It's easy to imagine the same thing happening with text. In fact, the speed that lawmakers and judges adopted the idea of generated text is a very big concern to me.

What is completely overlooked is the reader. He will have a hard time navigating the world.

I sometimes hear people say „there is so much interesting stuff to watch on youtube/pinterest/whatnot“ and i always wonder how the vastly the meaning of „interesting“ can vary.

What did smartphones do to photography?

I know what they did to cameras, but photography?

You still need the person who takes the picture, and the process of taking a picture hasn't really changed that much.

Charitably, smartphones made photography a hobby/art form/vocation accessible to almost everyone. We all carry a "good enough" camera in our pockets. So it's really opened up the hobby to a ton of people.

I don't know why LLMs would do that with "writing" though.

Yes, it democratized access and made everyone a photographer, which also had the effect of nuking the bottom tiers of paid professional photography / stock photos, and turned them into something people do mainly for intrinsic motivations (i.e. as a hobby or as a social activity).

The same might potentially happen with writing, where if anyone can generate a decent original story, poem, advertising copy, product UI writing, etc. in less than five minutes, the lowest and middle tiers of paid writing work will be eliminated.

It’s possible that because these writing-specific jobs were already low value / largely eliminated by the Internet at large, that won’t happen. But it could happen to almost any role that basically involves synthesis and summary of words and data, since LLMs are so general purpose.

Smartphones only cheapened photography in an additional manner. Which is why you get Instagram filled with pictures of food. It's the internet combined with the nearly free cost of digital.

But digital cameras for the everyday person existed long before the smartphone. And before that, point and shoot film cameras and Polaroid.

Smartphones changed access to cameras fundamentally; it went from something you had to specifically go buy to something you already have by default. Film to digital was also huge, for sure, but we're now at a level where >80% of people have a camera(phone) within reach of them at all times.

The marginal cost of taking a photo is now $0. It's a hobby that anyone with a smartphone can now take up.

People have cameras with them more often sure, but if you’re talking about taking up a hobby, nearly every family had a camera of some kind 20 years ago.

It’s was already a near universal hobby.

There is a big difference between one digital camera per household and one in the pocket of every person at all times.

Sure there is, but not a big one in terms of how many people the hobby was accessible to.

20 years ago nearly everyone took pictures at some point. Every house had a camera or two, and disposal cameras were cheap and very widely available.

It was widely regarded as a universal hobby back then. My mom was a wedding photographer, and people would regulars make the same arguments back then.

If you look at historic BLS data the number of photographers has actually grown faster than the population has since 2020, and the wages in 2021 were about the same adjusted for inflation.

Clearly smartphones haven’t had a huge impact on job numbers or salaries. My hypothesis is because photographic skill was already as devalued as it was likely to get, and that actual technical skill is a very small part of the overall job.

It further commodified it, and made it less viable as a career.

I think this is a good analogy.

Smartphone cameras are great and easy to use for a very narrow set of conditions. Outside those conditions they perform terribly. The kicker is that you don’t really know unless you already know… the “trained eye” can immediately notice.

The same is true for GPT text/code.

Even then, yes, it will still result shifts like we saw years ago with newspapers letting go of their photo staff and telling journalists to use their phones.

Smart phones dramatically increased the technical capability of amateurs, and to a lesser extent their mechanics, but the net outcome is a huge volume of very good, very boring & generic photographs. Smart phones did nothing to advance the art of communicating via pictures. AI writing IS likely to follow a similar path.

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