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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

> Additionally, I think it's good to remember that among the people most threatened by this future, it's those who write for a living. Journalists, script writers and lawyers, essentially.

An anecdote:

I live in a non-english-speaking country. Most people in academic fields can speak and write English, but not as good as a native speaker. It's a common practice here before submitting an essay, you send it to a professional editor to fix up / flesh out your broken English.

The whole thing has been gone. The workflow just have vanished in less than 2 years. So I just shrug when people tell me that AI won't actually replace any job.

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My wife uses chatgpt for this. The only problem is the output might be better English and less grammar mistakes but it reads downright cringy to a native English speaker. I think it’s easily identifiable as being passed through an LLM too by anyone familiar with the usage.

Has she tried specifying the kind of English she wants? I find for translation, even just saying something like this gets good results: "Please translate this so it sounds like a native speaker with an above-average vocabulary who is writing a business email to a colleague with whom she has a longstanding professional relationship. Do not make it sound too stilted or formal."

The real question is "is it good enough for the job"?

The broken english of original was clearly not enough, but a bit cringy alas correct may do the job fine and just like that another whole category of work is gone and same number of editors have to compete in ever shrinking market.

How is this different from grammarly, that has been around for many years?

This was a middleman job anyway, so it was just waiting to be removed, like travel agents.

> How is this different from grammarly, that has been around for many years?

I'm not sure how to answer this, because the compatibility gap between Grammarly and ChatGPT (even 3), in terms of English writing, is just too large. So large that I can barely categorize them as "the same kind of tools".

I can only confidently tell you one fact: before ChatGPT, people here were aware of Grammarly's existence. Yet they still sent their drafts to professional editors at a price of ~$0.1/word.

> This was a middleman job anyway, so it was just waiting to be removed, like travel agents.

You can say programmers are middlemen between specs and implementations. But that's not my point.

Indeed, I think it's middlemen all the way down. Everything eventually boils down to one of: survival, pursuit of happiness and pursuit of meaning. None of these actually require any actual "job" to be performed, and I can absolutely imagine us dealing with them in a post -scarcity world.

This is a nit-pick, but:

Travel agents are still around, but they’re not nearly as common as they used to be.

They are absolutely fantastic to have around when you want to discuss rather than plan the rote particulars of, for example, a “we saved for this one” vacation. A good travel agent has near-direct booking access to $GDS, has relationships, and vets and cross checks everything with a level of detail and experience that you really only get by doing it every day.

It has become something akin to the concierge industry.

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