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Any time things like this have happened in the past, a huge number of jobs have been created, and the impact on existing jobs has been less than expected. Illu

Any time things like this have happened in the past, a huge number of jobs have been created, and the impact on existing jobs has been less than expected. Illustrators – midjourney isn't going to replace great illustrators, it's going to allow more companies to have more illustrations, replace some use of stock illustrations, and aid productivity for illustrators in helping them churn out ideas that can be turned into more specific/tailored illustrations. Copywriters – GPT/etc aren't going to replace copy editors, they're going to allow many more people who wouldn't otherwise hire a copy editor to have better copy, and to aid productivity for copywriters, allowing them to move into more of a supervising role. Operations analyst – I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but if it's business intelligence, there's nothing anywhere near ready yet. These tools don't provide insight, they provide on-demand content that a human can curate for real insight. In general, these tools will act as productivity aids for the people already in these professions, allowing the jobs to evolve over time. That's not just at the top end but also at the junior end. More people will be able to make use of generated content for free, but they'll all find that it takes time to do so effectively, and find that eventually roles need to be hired for. If you're currently deciding not to hire these roles because they can be done with GPT/etc already, then I think you're either not quite serious about hiring for these roles, don't understand what goes into them, or have needs that are only marginally above those fulfilled by stock photos/illustrations etc.

cal85 4y ago
> GPT/etc aren't going to replace copy editors, they're going to allow many more people who wouldn't otherwise hire a copy editor to have better copy But won't it also allow many people who would otherwise hire a copy editor not to hire one?
- danpalmer 4y ago
  Somewhat, but I don't think it'll be a huge issue. - Increased accessibility of copy-editing will likely increase the market overall, and therefore increase the market for human copy-editors. - GPT/etc are good but don't have context, taste, and have proven to be quite fallible over multiple rounds of feedback (common in copywriting/illustration in particular), so offer a good starting point that needs human intervention to use. - Copy-editors aren't just a transactional prompt-in-copy-out service in human form, they hold products and brands in their head, understand customer segments and how copy applies to them, define strategy, and so on. They are proactive. Companies with these roles, already benefitting from these things, are unlikely to replace them with software (at least not effectively).
  - politician 4y ago
    If you eliminate the roles of juniors and enhance the productivity of seniors, then what happens when the seniors retire and die off? The number of roles for humans hits zero.
    - danpalmer 4y ago
      To be clear, I don't see these tools as being the equivalent of junior staff, I think they fulfil a different role. When I say "expert" I don't mean senior, I mean someone with domain skills. I think these tools will be usable by people of any skill level, and the result will be commensurate with the user's skill level. You'll still be able to hire junior illustrators, they'll use the tools, and they'll produce better results than if they didn't have the tools, but not as good as a senior person with the tools.
      - politician 4y ago
        My concern is that due to the amount of code that these tools can generate, a codebase will rapidly turn into mud in the hands of unskilled people. So, either you build an extensive code review process or only hire people who were working programmers before 2021 and augment them with AI assistants. Unfortunately, the latter kills off the role in a generation while the former kills off the business in the current generation. It’s lose/lose.
- tharkun__ 4y ago
  Yes absolutely. And it will allow you to replace the generally crappy ones that some companies can/do afford themselves with better copy than the humans churn out today. Instead of having a bunch of humans do a crappy job of writing documentation for your product, which then needs proofreading and editing etc. which requires even more humans, you just keep the one good guy and instead of editing and proofreading and adjusting the output of the humans, they do that w/ the output of ChatGPT. From what I've seen from our documentation guys, ChatGPT directly employed by our Product people would be a huge boost to quality. As in, we never even sprang for "the good guy" to begin with.
flappyeagle 4y ago
Illustrator: SAAS company in question started with a collection of illustrations in their brand style, and no longer needs human services for incremental production. The lead designer/creative director has more than adequate evaluation skills to prompt for 10 variations and pick the one that looks the most reasonable, and even make some adjustments in photoshop. Copywriter: e-commerce company that is constantly creating new SKUs. Managing a human copy-writing pipeline is annoying... many messages back and forth on slack/email between editor and copywriters to make adjustments. Much easier to chat with a computer and ask for more samples. Ops analyst: different SAAS company main job description was to collate customer requests into a big spreadsheet and categorize, summarize, present to stakeholders. Difficulty comes with scale, breadth of product, communications overhead. Previous hiring plan was to bring on 1 analyst per product line, 1:1 PM:analyst ratio. New plan is PMs do it themselves with help of LLMs.

cal85 4y ago

> GPT/etc aren't going to replace copy editors, they're going to allow many more people who wouldn't otherwise hire a copy editor to have better copy But won't it also allow many people who would otherwise hire a copy editor not to hire one?

danpalmer 4y ago
Somewhat, but I don't think it'll be a huge issue. - Increased accessibility of copy-editing will likely increase the market overall, and therefore increase the market for human copy-editors. - GPT/etc are good but don't have context, taste, and have proven to be quite fallible over multiple rounds of feedback (common in copywriting/illustration in particular), so offer a good starting point that needs human intervention to use. - Copy-editors aren't just a transactional prompt-in-copy-out service in human form, they hold products and brands in their head, understand customer segments and how copy applies to them, define strategy, and so on. They are proactive. Companies with these roles, already benefitting from these things, are unlikely to replace them with software (at least not effectively).
- politician 4y ago
  If you eliminate the roles of juniors and enhance the productivity of seniors, then what happens when the seniors retire and die off? The number of roles for humans hits zero.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    To be clear, I don't see these tools as being the equivalent of junior staff, I think they fulfil a different role. When I say "expert" I don't mean senior, I mean someone with domain skills. I think these tools will be usable by people of any skill level, and the result will be commensurate with the user's skill level. You'll still be able to hire junior illustrators, they'll use the tools, and they'll produce better results than if they didn't have the tools, but not as good as a senior person with the tools.
    - politician 4y ago
      My concern is that due to the amount of code that these tools can generate, a codebase will rapidly turn into mud in the hands of unskilled people. So, either you build an extensive code review process or only hire people who were working programmers before 2021 and augment them with AI assistants. Unfortunately, the latter kills off the role in a generation while the former kills off the business in the current generation. It’s lose/lose.
tharkun__ 4y ago
Yes absolutely. And it will allow you to replace the generally crappy ones that some companies can/do afford themselves with better copy than the humans churn out today. Instead of having a bunch of humans do a crappy job of writing documentation for your product, which then needs proofreading and editing etc. which requires even more humans, you just keep the one good guy and instead of editing and proofreading and adjusting the output of the humans, they do that w/ the output of ChatGPT. From what I've seen from our documentation guys, ChatGPT directly employed by our Product people would be a huge boost to quality. As in, we never even sprang for "the good guy" to begin with.

flappyeagle 4y ago

Illustrator: SAAS company in question started with a collection of illustrations in their brand style, and no longer needs human services for incremental production. The lead designer/creative director has more than adequate evaluation skills to prompt for 10 variations and pick the one that looks the most reasonable, and even make some adjustments in photoshop. Copywriter: e-commerce company that is constantly creating new SKUs. Managing a human copy-writing pipeline is annoying... many messages back and forth on slack/email between editor and copywriters to make adjustments. Much easier to chat with a computer and ask for more samples. Ops analyst: different SAAS company main job description was to collate customer requests into a big spreadsheet and categorize, summarize, present to stakeholders. Difficulty comes with scale, breadth of product, communications overhead. Previous hiring plan was to bring on 1 analyst per product line, 1:1 PM:analyst ratio. New plan is PMs do it themselves with help of LLMs.