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Comment by edavison1 | Hacker News Reader

>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out.

A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

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It doesn't matter how elite you think you are if the newspaper, magazine, or publishing company you write for can make more money from hiring people at a fraction of your cost and having them use AI to match or eclipse your professional output.

At some point the competition will be less about "does this look like the most skilled human writer wrote this?" and more about "did the AI guided by a human for a fraction of the cost of a skilled human writer output something acceptably good for people to read it between giant ads on our website / watch the TTS video on YouTube and sit through the ads and sponsors?", and I'm sorry to say, skilled human writers are at a distinct disadvantage here because they have professional standards and self respect.

So is the argument here that the New Yorker can make more money from AI slop writing overseen by low-wage overseas workers? Isn't that obviously not the case?

Anyway I think I've misunderstood the context in which we're using the word 'competition' here. My response was about attitudes toward AI from writers at the tip-top of the industry rather than profit maxxing/high-volume content farm type places.

It’s not that black and white. Maybe 1% of the top writers can take that stance and maybe even charge more for their all-human content (in a kind of vintage, handcraft kind of way) but the other 99% will have to adapt.

It’s simply more nuanced. If you’re writing a couple of articles a day to pay for your bills, what will stop you from writing actually 10 or 20 articles a day instead?

So you're saying major media companies are going to outsource their writing to people overseas using LLMs? There is more to journalism than the writing. There's also the investigative part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc.

This has become such a talking point of mine when I'm inevitably forced to explain why LLMs can't come for my job (yet). People seem baffled by the idea that reporting collects novel information about the world which hasn't been indexed/ingested at any point because it didn't exist before I did the interview or whatever it is.

People in meatspace are not (in James C. Scott's sense) legible to HN's user base, and never will be.

They definitely try to replace part of the people this way, starting with the areas where it's the easiest, but obviously it will continue to other people as the capabilities improve. A big example is sports journalism, where lots of venues have game summaries that do not involve any human who actually saw the game, but rather software embellishing some narrative from the detailed referee scoring data. Another example is autotranslation of foreign news or rewriting press releases or summarizing company financial 'news' - most publishers will eagerly skip the labor intensive and thus expensive part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc, if they can get away with that.

Exactly. Also, if the past few years is any indication, at the very least tech journalists in general tend to love to use what they hate.

Yes, but what really matters is what and how the general public, aka the consumers want to consume.

I can bang on about older games being better all day long but it doesn't stop Fortnite from being popular, and somewhat rightly so, I suppose.

i regularly (at least once a week) spot a typo or grammatical issue in a major news story. I see it in the NYTimes on occasion. I see it in local news ALL THE TIME. I swear an LLM would write better than have the idiots that are cranking out articles.

I agree with you that having elite writing skills will be useful for a long time. But the bar for proof reading seems to be quite low on average in the industry. I think you overestimate the writings skills of your average journalist.

Heh, when I see a spelling error in a news article.. I oddly feel like I can trust it more because it came from a human being. It's like a nugget of gold.

Will they maintain that stance when it gets into their pockets? I doubt it. If the public is not minding the difference, why would they?

Sure but no one gets to avoid all but the most elite content. I think they're bemoaning the quality of pulp.

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