Virtually all the jobs mentioned can already be replaced with AI for a fraction of the cost.
One thing is clear from this text: she can definitely write. I wonder what her erotic stories read like even though I'm not exactly the demographic they were aiming for.
I’m not so sure. First, they are already paying pennies to the writers. Second, who’s gonna write the prompt? The bosses certainly not, so they would hire prompters. Now, you cannot simply hire a prompter with zero experience in copywriting or editing; these people would not accept less than pennies for their work. So you just go ahead and hire people with writing experience. It’s easier.
Edit: besides, assuming AI will take over, if you want an original and catchy story, you need to provide a good prompt. I cannot think someone more suitable to provide such prompts than the writers themselves. Is like saying: anyone can create their own app with LLMs. Well, I can tell you my mom or my 21 year old cousin wouldn’t be able to do so (they wouldn’t be able to be more specific than a simple “I want a spotify-like app but in red”. They wouldn’t know what to do with the LLM output, even if it comes as an executable that you just need to drop in your phone). So you need developers here as well.
I think AIs will quickly progress to the point where the boss can just tell them to do X, instead of telling the prompter to tell the AI to do X.
No magic, all dumb for loops and string formatting and a bunch of calls to LLM. Just a single prompt from the manager. Writers can now go do a roofing job to put food on the table while the retirement age always grows proving them how AI is finally freeing humanity from having to work.
There's no boss in the world who wants to be left alone with the machine. They are bosses, they are not technical people; they don't like machines... machines cannot go to jail or be accountable for mistakes.
If there is a boss2 above boss1, then boss1 is accountable to boss2 for subordinates and there is almost no difference between blaming and firing an employee or blaming and firing an LLM or LLM developer. Also important to remember that an LLM doesn't snitch if you ask it to do shady stuff.
> There's no boss in the world who wants to be left alone with the machine
Most bosses want to be richer and want obedient underlings.
Remember it won't be a scary mainframe. It's basically a benign looking contact in your chat. Same thing they use to message their misstreases. They will be fine.
I make a living as a writer and I don't use AI. In fact, I hate AI and I work for an AI-free writing website. There is an audience for it, and we make enough money to support ourselves as well.
* AI fulfills a prompt. "Write me a story" or "write me an article" or "write me song lyrics" will get you a story or an article or song lyrics and that in itself is pretty amazing in itself, but as someone who has tried all of these things at various levels of sophistication, it's pretty clear to me that there's often something missing from these results, and of course there is, because you have to put whatever "something" is in the prompt to have good chances "something" will show up. Do you know what that something is when you conceive the story / article / song lyrics? You might... but you might not, the art might be half in the process you work through to figure out what "something" is, hand in hand with the work of giving it form. I can see how AI can help and have already used it this way, but I've already seen how it will often fail or produce Content™ rather than something that fulfills the full profile implied in the impulse to make the thing.
* "a fraction of the cost" is ... speculative to put it charitably. Users aren't exposed to anything remotely like the costs involved right now, the tech is only available at the moment by burning a huge amount of venture / research funding (on top the huge uncompensated labor heists that torching enlightenment copyright bargains represents). The true economics are pretty opaque before you even get deeper questions of like the implications of introducing an external dependency that may not be truly fungible and may represent unknown influences into the thought-level substrate of human culture / experience.
However, writers that lean into their identity and inject their personality into the writing, use video, and generally have a public brand will probably do fine. The fact is: we live in a video world now, so unless you can latch onto the brand of a larger entity to grow your audience, you're probably going to need to be on camera.
(This is basically how many writers are successful on Substack.)
Writers will also continue to be needed in fields where there is zero tolerance for errors (say, technical writers at complex manufacturing companies.)
Yeah and in a world where Veo3 exists. Using video is not a panacea. Actually if you post the video on youtube then it is used to train Veo so that you can be replaced... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070548
When so many models are trained on illegally-obtained data (libgen, etc.) and provide profit without acknowledgement to the folks whose creative output made said profit possible in the first place, it feels really icky to put it lightly.
What's more, the creative process is about pulling something out from inside of you, examining your ideas and yourself, and maybe showing it to the world. Feedback from others, editors or readers or whatever, is a reciprocation of that. Or if you keep it to yourself, you've learned and grown anyway, and have honed your craft for the next time you try it.
What reward is there in computer mimicry? How does AI empower this process?
From a commercial aspect it all sucks. Creatives are devalued and the creative process is arrested. This isn't new, though. Ever since we started calling entertainment "content," you could see it coming. It's a struggle Hollywood's faced since the studio system, even before. We had the subversives in the Code era, the new wave people, the auteurs, and so on, all fighting that good fight against the business people who spoke only in dollars and cents. So it was, so it shall be.
I don't think there will be an AI takeover in creative writing, except for maybe a hiccup where slop content creators chase gold. Already a couple of romance writers accidentally published stories with prompts left in them and have instantly ruined their reputations forever. I think the people interested in reading what a machine wrote are the people interested in making the machine write. Everyone else wants something from a real human.
Don't worry, if we keep it up, we can do this to everyone, all humanity, and finish our centuries long work of making a world that's hard on humans and good for our superorganisms -- business, capital organizations, churches and states that we started on centuries ago. Our technical creations can help us accelerate and complete the process by which we have chosen to make our only possible significance and value in how much we can scramble to control of these, crushing every other human endeavor and the suffering we create and potential joys we torch in meanwhile nothing but the meaningless price of progress.