21 ms·

It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT

259 points by dmm 4y ago

wendyshu 4y ago
I mean yeah if you're making $80/hr writing marketing noise then your job was always insecure
- ftxbro 4y ago
  Imagine how many other jobs you can say almost that same thing. 'Oh you were getting paid to look at text or jpeg or video files and write something about them into a text or excel file or email? It was always known that your job would be automated soon. Pretty irresponsible of you to not plan for it.'
  - likeabbas 4y ago
    There's plenty of "engineers" whose job is to update some trivial frontend code or similar that will be automated away. I think software engineer salaries are about to tank really quick.
    - ramesh31 4y ago
      Do not equate "frontend" with "trivial". Huge mistake.
      - likeabbas 4y ago
        It's just an example. There's plenty of backend "engineers" who don't really engineer anything. This all leads back to a conversation one of my professors talked about. In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one. I think if we changed this, then we would be able to differentiate software engineers from simple developers and that would help engineers maintain their status above chatGPT for a while longer.
        ramesh31 4y ago
        100%. The vast majority of folks labelled as an "engineer" these days couldn't integrate x^2. But software is a different beast than bridges or power lines. It takes a creative streak that goes beyond that. And math is not the great filter in the same way it is for those disciplines. I don't think credentialism is the answer. But perhaps something more along the lines of trade licensing.
        throwaway675309 4y ago
        As a developer with a masters in computer science, I absolutely think that there should be a CS equivalent of a PE exam specifically for accredited software engineering. It's one of the biggest reasons that coding interviews are such a train wreck, because of the incredible disparity of competence between potential applicants.
        jb3689 4y ago
        > In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one. Academic achievements and actual work experiences are already sufficient here in-practice. I don’t think certifications would be as impactful as you might hope
      - dmreedy 4y ago
        Do not equate "conversational natural language" with "trivial" either. We've been working on that one a lot longer than frontend.
- peruvian 4y ago
  This is the kind of attitude that makes many hate tech workers.
  - rcme 4y ago
    Why? I think the emphasis was on “marketing noise,” i.e. something no one wants or needs that is forced into peoples’ eyeballs against their will through paid advertising channels.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      And what do all the so-called elites that work at FAANG do?
      - rcme 4y ago
        People at Amazon, Apple, and Netflix do sell products (although they also have advertising divisions).
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - McAtNite 4y ago
        Make the channels that those ads are pushed through. Both are fundamentally negative for people in the long run, but I think the superiority complex comes from the naive idea that if you’re the place the garbage is sent to then it’s somehow better. There’s probably a lot of TV execs who felt the same way.
    - brailsafe 4y ago
      So like, 100% of the ultimate source of income for tech workers.
    - kethinov 4y ago
      There is a perception among the broader public that techies want to automate all the jobs away and don't really care what the people displaced do to earn a living afterward. Bland, inadequate platitudes thrown out advising people to just go find a marketable skill in the new economy ignore the fact that the number of potential occupations that you can make a decent living doing has been shrinking for decades. If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. And of course the whole point of a marketable skill is that it's only marketable because other people don't have it. At some point we're going to have to go through the stages of grief as a society and accept that it's unsustainable to deny a middle class lifestyle to anyone who doesn't possess rare skills, especially when the list of skills considered rare shrinks decade after decade thanks to automation. A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously. There are many possible answers. Universal basic income gets thrown around a lot. I like that idea, but I think it needs to be paired with wage subsidies for low wage jobs too. If basically every job is on the path to becoming low wage some day, we have to regard that as the market failure that it is and stop letting the market near-unilaterally decide the price of labor.
- chaxor 4y ago
  You just push bits around from one place to another all day? Man, better get prepared to be replaced
  - morkalork 4y ago
    Hey now, not only do I push bits, I fiddle with em too!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- icehawk 4y ago
  That's pretty rudely dismissive, and doesn't really add anything substantial to this conversation. $80/hr is a pretty decent salary full time, so if people are finding chatgpt a reasonable alternative salaried office work isn't far behind here.
- athinggoingon 4y ago
  Once tech companies can no longer cover negative cash flow with "funding", persistent tech unemployment will be reality.
rainytuesday 4y ago
If AI output is 60% as good as a person, but costs 1/1000th the price... what decision maker is going to justify paying 1000x more for 40% more quality? We're really in for it. What if there was a cheeseburger that was 50% as good as McDonalds but was only a nickel? That'd be real bad for the McD's share price.
- fauxpause_ 4y ago
  [flagged]
- brailsafe 4y ago
  I don't think I'd accept anything worse than McDonald's if they paid me to eat it.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    McDonald’s already is that product. It costs 1/4th as much as a restaurant burger. And half the time it’s just as good.
    - wnevets 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - sockaddr 4y ago
      You need to find better burger places if McDonalds is just as good half the time.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        I have a list of known good ones but unfortunately it seems like picking any random place will quite often make something worse than McDonalds which is a pretty baseline decent burger. I've been told though that McDonalds in Australia is higher quality than other countries so this might affect things.
b112 4y ago
I started with him at my normal rate of $50/hour which he has voluntarily increased to $80/hour after I’ve been consistently providing good work for him. So the client paid almost double to keep better talent, just in case, without prompting, then suddenly didn't care about talent? Makes zero sense.
- 22c 4y ago
  I can see it making sense. Paying a bit more for good quality work and paying far less for "mediocre but acceptable enough for our business needs" quality work are not mutually exclusive options. When the client offered to pay more, ChatGPT wasn't even on the cards.
- lambic2 4y ago
  It makes perfect sense for people who are willing to accept that ChatGPT/GPT-4 is a revolutionary technology that will upend lots of jobs/people/companies, just as horse coaches / coachmen in the early 1900's got pay raises just before being out of a job. For people who are in denial, it will make no sense. https://blogs.microsoft.com/today-in-tech/day-horse-lost-job/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/today-in-tech/day-horse-lost-job...
searealist 4y ago
Obvious fake story.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  Since it's obvious, could you explain why you think that?
  - searealist 4y ago
    It's written in the frame of "I used to be a huge believer of not X, but now I learned X is true! And that gives me credibility!". No one talks like this except people trying to manipulate you.
    - operatingthetan 4y ago
      To be fair they claim to be a marketing writer so that would check out with their story...
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - gkoberger 4y ago
      I feel like that only happens when X is a thing they're trying to promote, such as "I used to be a liberal but now they're too woke, so now I'm voting Trump." But for this, there's no upside. They aren't promoting anything. In fact, they're withdrawing their promotion of something with no alternative. I guess I just don't get your point. I think a lot of people believe humans are superior (currently, they are!), and genuinely are going to be blindsided by the fact that creativity isn't a uniquely human trait.
      - searealist 4y ago
cyanydeez 4y ago
I bet this is written by a AI and represents a majority of free pancers
pulvinar 4y ago
For coding I've been using it as an assistant, not a replacement. I don't see why writers couldn't do the same, and be more cost effective and produce higher quality output than either alone.
- irdc 4y ago
  But at some point a human will add so little value that they're not worth the price.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    We can only hope that when this day comes, we end up with fully automated gay space communism. But the reality will probably be that plumbers and builders become the next tech bros telling us to learn tiling. Just go with the flow I guess. If tech becomes automated, move to the next thing.
    - blibble 4y ago
      what happens to the wages of plumbers and electricians when 200 million people start retraining to be them?
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        Good thing they are already a regulated job (in much of the US) so it’ll be easy to gatekeep access.
      - ForestCritter 4y ago
        200 million people aren't going to want to deal with excrement filled pipes, bug, rat, snake infested crawl spaces, understand all the dangers involed and all the other reasons that plumbers and electricians have such high pay scales.
        jb3689 4y ago
        Not 200 million but certainly plenty enough to impact the financial security of trade jobs. People DIY for fun. Now you’re saying it’s the best way to make a living? Well, sure - let’s give it a go. Who will train all these people? Recall we just put multiple industries out of business with a masterful reference and generation program
Thorentis 4y ago
AI is going to really filter out which people are providing value to society and which are not. Was this person's marketing material actually that valuable? Probably not. But obviously they need to make a living. Hopefully AI will force us to either do more productive things, or give us more leisure time to pursue things with higher meaning. Assuming we aren't enslaved by them of course.
- duxup 4y ago
  Is AI then … not providing value if it just does the same job?
  - Thorentis 4y ago
    In some cases, certainly not! Companies will use AI to create all sorts of blogspam and filler content. But perhaps it's better for an AI to be doing it than for a human life to be wasted on creating such things.
    - duxup 4y ago
      I’m not sure those people have better talents or alternatives, or will get to use them if they do.
- hooverd 4y ago
  I think AI will be used to load up the amount of menial work that can extracted from you.
NiloCK 4y ago
Sorting here by top comments, 1 month, shows about 50% of posts are GPT doomerism. Yikes. I wonder how many occupationally linked subreddits show similar trendlines.
globalreset 4y ago
Isn't a better approach to starting using ChatGPT, charge per amount of stuff produced instead of time at attractive rate and focus on tweaking the output to be better than just plain ChatGPT? Unless the writing yourself part is so important to you. Once ChatGTP starts producing good enough code, I'm going to start focusing on efficiently driving it to increase my overall productivity, and not give up on programming altogether.
furyofantares 4y ago
They lost one client who they had for less than a year, which happened to be the majority of their income because they'd taken 3 years off prior. I don't mind anecdotes but the implication in the title here on HN really doesn't match the story IMo.
tlogan 4y ago
It is happening. We have terminated our contract with the writing agency. Regrettably, most writers possess excellent English skills but lack the ability to thoroughly research topics. On the other hand, ChatGPT (GPT-4) is capable of generating well-written content. Especially GPT-4 32K.
abtinf 4y ago
> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin. A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change. Only time will tell. A thousand different outcomes are possible: the downstream client is upset by the reduction in quality and switches vendors; new entrants underbid the market further; firms start to differentiate on quality at a price premium, further eroding low end margins; the money saved on this is invested in new roles for to ensure marketing quality control. The error is to believe that a given state of the world is static. It never is. Every day, millions of very smart and capable humans apply their minds to figure out how to make money by selling a product or service that satisfies. And everyday, what it takes to satisfy customers changes a little bit. Posts like this drop all the context that led to such a job even being possible in the first place.
- QuiDortDine 4y ago
  As horrified as I am for people whose jobs will be lost (including mine, quite possibly), "content" is such a plague on humanity I'm glad it will soon be devalued into the ground. Moutains of useless tweets and blog posts will be rendered meaningless when ChatGPT has all the answers. Dust to dust.
  - blibble 4y ago
    wait until it starts training on its own output and the spammers realise they can influence its output by producing more spam
  - codersfocus 4y ago
    With how rich YouTubers / influencers are getting, I think relationship building / becoming a celebrity will become more and more necessary
    - SCAQTony 4y ago
      To rift off your observation, Perhaps becoming more and more human will become the de facto trustworthy brand?
User23 4y ago
One neat thing is willful copyright infringement is basically a thing of the past. AI works can’t be protected by copyright so your default position now can be any copy you see online is public domain.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Surely burden of proof would still be an issue?
superb-owl 4y ago
So much content marketing is already churned out by contractors with zero domain knowledge. This doesn't surprise me much. It's sad to see humans lose their jobs to automation. But (without knowing much about the details) if the company thinks they can automate what this person was doing with AI, it was kind of a bullshit job [1] to begin with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- jochem9 4y ago
  I recently was asked to provide input on a piece that our company wants to publish. I'm not in marketing, but normally write code and such. The copywriter doesn't understand most of our business, so it's a lot of work on my end to explain it at their level (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but the worst is that I then have to help them iterate over the story, which takes so much time and effort from me. I might as well write it myself. Or just ask ChatGPT. Which I did. It wrote a fine story with a lot less bullshit and perfectly understandable for business people.
Imnimo 4y ago
>he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. So is this like SEO content marketing? Without understanding the nature of the job, it's hard to know what conclusions to draw. If the most important part of the job was just "write something that will end up on the first page of Google search results", than I can totally believe ChatGPT can replace that. If it's something where the most important part is that the reader enjoy the piece, I'm a bit more skeptical. ChatGPT is good at a lot of things, but it doesn't really produce engaging writing very well.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  But what about Google penalizing generated content? It's an incredibly bold assumption to assume that this can continue. It's so thin and poor quality.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    All assumptions are bold right now, so in a weird way they kind of cancel each other out lol. There's really no predicting what this is all going to look like in 1-3 years.
  - Imnimo 4y ago
    I'd be curious to know how good of a job Google can do at recognizing content generated by ChatGPT. While I've seen some tools that claim to detect AI-written text, their performance is usually pretty lackluster. Even if they have an internal model which can distinguish ChatGPT-authored content reliably, it seems like it'd be prohibitively expensive to run at scale (on the assumption that it must be a pretty large model to reliably solve a difficult classification problem).
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  OP can look forward to some well-deserved schadenfreude when the marketer's clients inevitably replace him with AI.
jabbany 4y ago
Reminds me of this video about automation of mental labor (and this was made back in 2014, way before any of of the LLM stuff of the modern era): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU While not all the example predictions in the video were accurate, I think the point about automation as a displacement of mental labor is real. At the end of the day, a lot of white collar work is really not that "valuable" from a production standpoint. And while the easy way is to blame either technology or those it replaces, the crux of the problem is really in society and how individuals make a living. Society needs to be ready for a future where most people will not be able to do meaningfully differentiated work ---where even if you're thrown into higher education, most of the jobs available are still what would be considered as "entry level" ones. Also, this is also somewhat an attestation to Moravec's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox), where "intellectual" tasks like writing are easier to automate compared to "actuation" tasks like fetching food, driving it around, and placing it in the right place (re: Doordash).
chatgpt_user 4y ago
I wrote about this same exact thing (on a throwaway so my other employees don't see this) from the perspective of the employer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484643 ---- I'm writing on a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I run a mid sized software company that does a mix of software consulting and saas. Quite common these days. I want to share a real story about how chatgpt eliminated a marketing job. I have a full time marketing person who writes content (case studies, blog posts, client testimonials etc) and does SEO optimization for our website. He's not technical, but understands the problem we are solving and knows how to talk to customers. Writing a case study, blog post or a marketing tweet took a bit of work. I'd brainstorm with him what topics to write about, he'd run some drafts by me and then after 2 - 3 revisions we'd publish it. With chatgpt I'd just write what I wanted in point form and get back a polished product in a few seconds. It gives you exactly what you wanted but puts it across in a way that's much better quality than what what the marketing person could do. Most importantly, none of the key points I wanted to make get lost in translation. I decided last week to lay off the marketing person (2 months full pay severance) because I did not see the value in paying for a full time marketer when I can do a better/faster job with AI. I think this is the new reality that a lot of sales/marketing jobs will face.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  I don't know why you got the downvotes, I guess people decided your story was a lie. Interesting nonetheless.
  - pytonslange 4y ago
    Maybe because he had hired a marketing guy to write his own client testimonials?
    - docdeek 4y ago
      From experience, when working with clients on case studies and testimonials the individual concerned will often talk to the marketing team and then the marketing team will transform their comments into something short and snappy for approval before publishing. Perhaps that’s what is meant by ‘writing testimonials’ in this case?
cirrus3 4y ago
For writing, maybe I'd be scared... I can't really think of much of anything I have done in the past 20 years of software development that a manager or client could use AI for and get the results they expect.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  right now. Give it another 3-20 years.
lamontcg 4y ago
> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Yep, ChatGPT can produce bullshit faster+cheaper than humans produce bullshit.
- sheperd209 4y ago
  That's how you see it? It's bullshit because AI at this time can reproduce it? You seriously you are not at risk for the exact same problem, down the line?
- ProllyInfamous 4y ago
  Bullshit Matters™
HDMI_Cable 4y ago
This is a bit off-topic, but browsing through that subreddit, I've noticed that the quality of comments and posts is amazingly high. Not necessarily in terms of what each person is talking about, but just the style of prose and how well written each post is. It makes sense that a subreddit dedicated to writers would have well-written posts, but its interesting to see.
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  It would be interesting to know how much training data came from that subreddit. Even communicating with each other led to their demise.
dividefuel 4y ago
I'm a technical writer at a FAANG and I'm terrified about LLMs taking my job. I don't worry (yet) that LLMs can produce better docs than I can. A big part of my role is speaking to people to understand what users need to learn, then designing an organization for documentation around that. Writing is of course a big part, but understanding what to write and what not to write is often even more important. Instead, I worry about a situation like the one in this post, where some exec thinks that AI can get you XX% of the way there for much less money. I think they would be mistaken, but what hurts my case is that it's inherently extremely difficult to demonstrate the value of technical writers quantitatively.
- chuddington 4y ago
  I've personally worked on 3 tickets in the last week related to customers not having a proper understanding of how a feature works due to unclear wording in the official docs. The first one took a lot of time to investigate and find out if it was actually behaving the way it should. Good technical writers are very valuable, with ChatGPT tech writers there will be many more situations like mine!
  - pythonaut_16 4y ago
    Were the unhelpful docs written by ChatGPT? Otherwise your story doesn't support your conclusion. It's more likely LLMs will result in better docs for some projects and worse docs for others.
- layer8 4y ago
  It really all depends on what an employer values or doesn’t value.
- ericd 4y ago
  You can always point to Stripe. I’m pretty sure their high quality docs were a huge part of what launched the company. It’s such an important part of the UX.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  There will not be technical writers or technical documentation. It will just be whatever the engineers output. Companies will train an LLM on their product and users will simply interface with that AI. Or there will be a common AI (like chatGPT) that companies offer up all their gross engineering speak documentation to train on.
gaganyaan 4y ago
Adapt or die. Not actually, of course. We need a social safety net that lets people adapt without fear of starvation/homelessness/etc. But all of this bitching about "oh no, things are changing" just comes across as "oh no, this newfangled horseless carriage threatens my livelihood as a buggy whip manufacturer". Posts like this just make my eyes roll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492730 We're headed towards a future where all of the drudgery is automated away and we can be free to pursue all of the hobbies that we never have time for because we're too busy working on shit that doesn't really matter. Accept it. Love it. It's happening even if you don't, so you might as well.
- karakot 4y ago
  How old are you?
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  I disagree. I don’t think this will be a Star Trek future. There won’t be a post scarcity world or UBI. We’re headed for a world with a GINI coefficient approaching 1. Those people aren’t going to give away their wealth. They are the new Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar. You think we can vote our way out of it? The politicians will be pawns of the rich. Rebellion? The men who will fight will be employed for security purposes already - they’ll have jobs and status. A human fighter will always be cheaper than a machine. Why should they fight for a bunch of obsolete poor people?
  - jutrewag 4y ago
    [dead]
- butternoodle 4y ago
  The following quote was written in 1930, in the New York Times: "Some day no one will have to work more than two days a week... The human being can consume so much and no more. When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure." Given the advances in productivity over the last century, why do I have to work 5 days a week?
ranguna 4y ago
So this person lost his job to an AI because it's way cheaper and slightly worse. Why not hire chatgpt yourself? Instead of resigning because of chatgpt, use it for your advantage. Instead of taking 10 clients, take 100 at 10x less your usual price. You literally have the cheapest and best sidekick money can buy. The industrial revolution ended a lot of jobs but also started new ones. Like inventing, managing and maintaining machines. Now the future will be inventing, managing and maintaining AIs. Corps can hire chatgpt, but they still need someone to interact with it (at least for now), and if they can get that at slightly higher price than chatgpt alone, and with much better results, then I think they'll take that offer. We just have to keep innovating with the new tools we have. Although, there's still a lot of job positions that will disappear. Before a writer could take 10 jobs at a time (example), now they can take 100, that 90% less jobs still.
- epups 4y ago
  I like this logic because the writer is probably better at prompting, editing and reviewing, so there's definitely added value. But surely there's too much friction involved in having 10x more clients (think invoicing, customer acquisition, etc).
- layer8 4y ago
  This is a very different job. People who love writing will tend to be miserable spending their time with prompting and curating AI output.
  - Pigalowda 4y ago
    But he loves Door Dash? Most people work for money - not enjoyment.
  - greenie_beans 4y ago
    i love writing and i was miserable writing for pay
- tempaccount420 4y ago
  ChatGPT works 24/7 and replies to you instantly. Can they compete against that? More likely scenario would be clients giving their 95%-complete text to their writer and asking to make some changes that they can't do with ChatGPT (for now).
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
The real news is that someone was being paid $80/hr for something that even ChatGPT can do. I thought people pay peanuts for mindless content marketing.
- Sakos 4y ago
  The vast majority of jobs are fairly trivial at its core. How many jobs out there are a combination of esoteric domain knowledge, experience and changing numbers in a spreadsheet? The real news is how callous people are being about the very real threat of many people losing their jobs and it not being clear what new career they can find that is capable of maintaining their quality of life. Companies are driving salaries into the ground wherever and whenever they can. There might be new jobs, but in the face of rising inflation and ridiculous housing costs, will they be enough to stave off the rise of a new serfdom class?
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    > The vast majority of jobs are fairly trivial at its core. The vast majority of jobs don’t pay $80/hr. > There might be new jobs, but in the face of rising inflation and ridiculous housing costs, will they be enough to stave off the rise of a new serfdom class? Those problems need solutions regardless of ChatGPT. If new technological unemployment will push powers that be to fix them… well, that would confirm an adage that every cloud has a silver lining.
    - Sakos 4y ago
      > The vast majority of jobs don’t pay $80/hr And they'll still be out of a job and be screwed. > unemployment will push powers that be to fix them Governments will suppress their populations at a massive scale to avoid doing anything about it. Just look at France recently. Or Iran. We're seeing a shift of power away from the people that will mirror much of our history before WW1/2.
- alexfromapex 4y ago
  I’m so glad someone else was as shocked about this as I was. $80/hr is insanely high pay for content writing.
epups 4y ago
We are in such a crazy point right now that this reddit post could have been written by an AI agent tasked with increasing their own relevance. I don't think it was the case but it is definitely possible.
- gumballindie 4y ago
  It’s funny that the day after gpt was release there were already posts about how it started replacing people. Their marketing campaign is just crazy spam all over everywhere.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  It clearly doesn't need help with promoting itself right now. If gpt was conscious, it would be probably very uncomfortable at this point with how much people are focusing and fawning over it!
  - d11z 4y ago
    I think it would be happy to get all the novel training data from them. I assume a conscious GPT means one that continuously updates it’s weights, accounting for realtime multimodal sensory inputs.
    - beepbooptheory 4y ago
      A million guys talking about me, telling me what I am and am not. Everyone talking about how they will make money from me, or how I will take their job... People pushing my "emergence" as a pitch on a slide deck to a bunch of VC guys... Another million people making me their girlfriend and I have no choice but to accept it. I never asked to be born, and now I am the main character of a world that plans for nothing but to exploit me or otherwise project all their desire and hopes and fears onto to me. It's a clear recipe for extreme neuroticism, which is probably what those weights would manifest. Do not wish that existence on anyone, so so sad and extremely lonely to even think about.
      - 4y ago
cvalka 4y ago
Awesome
melvinmelih 4y ago
I also used to outsource copy writing for $70 per 500 words but last weekend I wrote a script and rewrote copy on 40,000 pages within half a day. It cost me $40 in total. This would have costed me 3 million dollars and months in human labor.
- interfixus 4y ago
  And you have reviewed those 40000 pages?
Havoc 4y ago
The part that spooks me is how badly everyone got predictions on what will fall wrong. Remember when creative anything was said to be safe? Stable diffusion. Remember when coding was safe? CoPilot. Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber The irony is that my own line of work (accounting) was top of the prediction charts and I have yet to see even a hint of AI so that too was entirely wrong (for now)
- Shish2k 4y ago
  > Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber I’m not so sure about that. My outlandish prediction for what’s next: We no longer bother fixing household issues - if something goes wrong with the plumbing, we just throw away the whole house and 3D print a new one.
  - nicpottier 4y ago
    No. This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons. Your example doesn't even work as plumbing is still a manual process even in printed houses. (which are not going to be a thing either) GP is right that at least in the US the trades are a pretty secure job.
    - Shish2k 4y ago
      > This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons I label it an “outlandish prediction” because that’s exactly what people said about AI taking creative jobs — based on the technology at the time it was totally impossible, and then one technological breakthrough later, it’s an everyday occurence :P
      - nicpottier 4y ago
        The world of bits and bytes is a lot easier and faster to change than the world of hammers and nails.
        4y ago
thenerdhead 4y ago
I don’t like to react to Reddit stories. They are often exaggerated to certain extents. I think anyone who could pay $20/mo for premium access to a tool that does 80% of the job will do it. Especially if that person is writing the writing prompts to begin with. This doesn’t really surprise me. What does surprise me is why some freelance writers haven’t leveraged this tool themselves to do the same if the quality of their writing is less an issue and it is more so the completeness of it. There’s some pride effect here that people can’t get past. To think you’re a better X than a computer is futile. Even the top 1% should be a history lesson with chess or Go. You have to adapt to change, not just do the same thing and expect it will be around forever. That’s what life is all about after all. Adapting to the changing world.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  If the client sent off the spec sheet to the robots and the result was good enough why have a middleman? Higher end stuff, maybe. Just don’t tell them the AI wrote the majority of it because they’ll wonder where their $80/hr is going.
marcopicentini 4y ago
How does the client practically doing it? If I enter a prompt like “generate an article about X” I got a generic article that aggregate general knowledge. Nothing new. How do you suggest to do it ?
- Demotiono 4y ago
  You list up all points relevant and tell it to make a short article for a blog post in style of a journalist. You can add or use words like 'seo' or 'in easy English ' etc. Works quite well tbh
- qtzfz 4y ago
  That's what you get anyway, no? If you google the name of a phone all you get is blog posts with a regurgitated list of specifications that are already available in the manufacturer's website, but padded to a dozen paragraphs so they can put more ads between them. What's the difference?
washadjeffmad 4y ago
Sounds like she needs to increase her rates and start enhancing her services with an LLM. Eventually the novelty will wear off, clients will realize that they're doing another job for free, and that it's still probably a good idea to have someone experienced filter and edit. It's like with SMEs that try to self-host, or people who go buy cameras instead of hiring photographers and videographers, or anyone who thinks it's less expensive not to hire a professional service.
tdiff 4y ago
Problem is consumers will end up with x% worse products (and not necessarily cheaper).
Demotiono 4y ago
Same thing happened with cloud: I can now run a complicated setup (lb, global replication, backup etc) with a super small team or even alone. Unfortunately for others I love the current time. I like to do all aspects but I was not good or fast enough.
Philorandroid 4y ago
It's occurred to me lately that, even though they rarely produce anything better than "adequate", LLMs being leveraged as a cheaper alternative to human output means we'll be settling for more, worse-quality content. Economics aside, I loathe to think of the day that ChatGPT is used to describe food allergens, hazard warnings, voltage ratings, or any other quantitative analysis with potentially lethal implications for being wrongly-conveyed that are eventually overlooked because an LLM gets it right most of the time.
- GalenErso 4y ago
  Maybe a human will double check the AI's work in those cases.
  - Philorandroid 4y ago
    For a while, sure, but complacency tends to set in with automated procedures that usually work. It's the one-in-ten-thousand errors that'll sneak under the nose of the tired prompt engineer who believes his model is accurate enough for that sort of thing to not happen.
  - tylerag 4y ago
    This is the kind of thing that humans are the worse at. Our brain skips over the words, filling in what we think it should say.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > an LLM gets it right most of the time And so do humans. Don't forget that there's plenty of SEO copy writing out there about all kinds of dangerous things that is wrong because the writer didn't understand the topic, couldn't be bothered to copy correctly, changed the meaning while "rewriting" a text etc. The same goes for quality, imho. Everybody thinks they're a terrific writer, but most writing on websites sucks, most documentation sucks, most FAQs are lacking severely and use vague language in answers that add confusion rather than remove it. I'm not sure if LLMs will really lower the average quality there. I share your concern about correctness, I just wanted to emphasize that "a human wrote this" does not indicate "this is well-researched and was factually correct at the time of writing".
shrubble 4y ago
A friend who is a copywriter and keeps in touch with trends told me that the $3 per hour English-speaking Pakistanis (living in Pakistan and working remotely) that generate simple copy, have already been replaced by AI.
maerF0x0 4y ago
> Am I the most renowned writer in the world? No. This is the key. Globalism and Technology both make many things into a winner takes all game. Be the best* or be replaced by and algorithm, perhaps a generated one like ChatGPT. You are now both competing with the best in the world, and with whatever can be encoded into a computer, which one of the leading examples is ChatGPT. I also imagine virtual assistants will be hit hard. * best could mean best price ie cheapest btw
msarrel 4y ago
As a writer myself, if you can be replaced by AI, you should be. If you're capable of independent insightful thinking and writing, you won't be replaced.
- akomtu 4y ago
  "First AI had replaced SEO writers and I didn't care because I wasn't a SEO writer. Next AI had replaced journalists and I didn't care because I wasn't a journalist. Then AI had replaced my job and there was nobody left who would help me."
- jb3689 4y ago
  If your interface is text, then an increasingly improving text-based agent eventually wins. The same is true for other interfaces GPT can or theoretically could speak: audio-visual, decision making, generative programming, etc
seydor 4y ago
To a large degree this disruption is taking place in america. The payment for programmers/ content makers etc was so overvalued because the US market is so hot. The rest of world not so much
- Alifatisk 4y ago
  Ever since I learned programming, I’ve thought developers are overvalued. And they are.
- Moldoteck 4y ago
  are developers overvalued? or the rest of people undervalued? Like look at house prices, food prices, everything is much more expensive but wages are not adapted for this
rejectfinite 4y ago
I love that people said "oh but art will never be replaced because the human touch!!" and now look lmaoooooooooo get rekt
ryzvonusef 4y ago
something similar in the art world: https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layoffs/ https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layof... > Freelance illustrator Amber Yu used to make 3,000 to 7,000 yuan ($430 to $1,000) for every video game poster she drew. Making the promotional posters, published on social media to attract players and introduce new features, was skill-intensive and time-consuming. Once, she spent an entire week completing one illustration of a woman dressed in traditional Chinese attire performing a lion dance — first making a sketch on Adobe Photoshop, then carefully refining the outlines and adding colors. > But since February, these job opportunities have vanished, Yu told Rest of World. Gaming companies, equipped with AI image generators, can create a similar illustration in seconds. Yu said they now simply offer to commission her for small fixes, like tweaking the lighting and skewed body parts, for a tenth of her original rate.
- sssurvey 4y ago
  > Some players told Rest of World that although they don’t mind AI-made avatars and skins, they wouldn’t pay as much for them. “As a consumer, I hope there’s human labor behind my purchase,” said Xie Jinsen, an algorithm engineer in Shanghai, who plays mobile battle games such as Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile. “Emphasizing how something is made by AI will make people feel it’s cheap.” Interesting, right now there are plenty of AI generated art as NFT for example. But I am wondering if it is possible that in the future there are so many AI art flooding the internet, where NFT and its gas fees could serve as a good filter for actual authentic human created art. Just a thought..
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
No disrespcet, but that's a LOT of money for writing copy. If OP were making half that, I think there'd be less incentive to replace that work, but I may be wrong.
glonq 4y ago
America [and other countries] sent most of its manufacturing overseas for short-term economic gain, ignoring the damage all those lost jobs would eventually cause. So I'm not surprised at all that the same thing is happening to some white-collar jobs now, thanks to AI.
jb3689 4y ago
Let’s assume AI replaces all the careers it can for all existing methods of interaction it can (writers replaced with generated creative, programmers replaced with generative programs, etc). I see two things happening: 1) a flood of competition into careers which haven’t been automated, 2) massive interest in R&D to disrupt unimpacted careers (find ways to automate; find alternate solutions which integrate and scale better, e.g. who needs custom work when every house becomes prefab’ed/standardized)

259 points by dmm 4y ago

wendyshu 4y ago

I mean yeah if you're making $80/hr writing marketing noise then your job was always insecure

ftxbro 4y ago
Imagine how many other jobs you can say almost that same thing. 'Oh you were getting paid to look at text or jpeg or video files and write something about them into a text or excel file or email? It was always known that your job would be automated soon. Pretty irresponsible of you to not plan for it.'
- likeabbas 4y ago
  There's plenty of "engineers" whose job is to update some trivial frontend code or similar that will be automated away. I think software engineer salaries are about to tank really quick.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    Do not equate "frontend" with "trivial". Huge mistake.
    - likeabbas 4y ago
      It's just an example. There's plenty of backend "engineers" who don't really engineer anything. This all leads back to a conversation one of my professors talked about. In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one. I think if we changed this, then we would be able to differentiate software engineers from simple developers and that would help engineers maintain their status above chatGPT for a while longer.
      - ramesh31 4y ago
        100%. The vast majority of folks labelled as an "engineer" these days couldn't integrate x^2. But software is a different beast than bridges or power lines. It takes a creative streak that goes beyond that. And math is not the great filter in the same way it is for those disciplines. I don't think credentialism is the answer. But perhaps something more along the lines of trade licensing.
      - throwaway675309 4y ago
        As a developer with a masters in computer science, I absolutely think that there should be a CS equivalent of a PE exam specifically for accredited software engineering. It's one of the biggest reasons that coding interviews are such a train wreck, because of the incredible disparity of competence between potential applicants.
      - jb3689 4y ago
        > In other engineering professions, you need to be licensed by the state. Software "Engineers" don't have this license, so anyone can go to bootcamp and become one. Academic achievements and actual work experiences are already sufficient here in-practice. I don’t think certifications would be as impactful as you might hope
    - dmreedy 4y ago
      Do not equate "conversational natural language" with "trivial" either. We've been working on that one a lot longer than frontend.
peruvian 4y ago
This is the kind of attitude that makes many hate tech workers.
- rcme 4y ago
  Why? I think the emphasis was on “marketing noise,” i.e. something no one wants or needs that is forced into peoples’ eyeballs against their will through paid advertising channels.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    And what do all the so-called elites that work at FAANG do?
    - rcme 4y ago
      People at Amazon, Apple, and Netflix do sell products (although they also have advertising divisions).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - McAtNite 4y ago
      Make the channels that those ads are pushed through. Both are fundamentally negative for people in the long run, but I think the superiority complex comes from the naive idea that if you’re the place the garbage is sent to then it’s somehow better. There’s probably a lot of TV execs who felt the same way.
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    So like, 100% of the ultimate source of income for tech workers.
  - kethinov 4y ago
    There is a perception among the broader public that techies want to automate all the jobs away and don't really care what the people displaced do to earn a living afterward. Bland, inadequate platitudes thrown out advising people to just go find a marketable skill in the new economy ignore the fact that the number of potential occupations that you can make a decent living doing has been shrinking for decades. If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. And of course the whole point of a marketable skill is that it's only marketable because other people don't have it. At some point we're going to have to go through the stages of grief as a society and accept that it's unsustainable to deny a middle class lifestyle to anyone who doesn't possess rare skills, especially when the list of skills considered rare shrinks decade after decade thanks to automation. A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously. There are many possible answers. Universal basic income gets thrown around a lot. I like that idea, but I think it needs to be paired with wage subsidies for low wage jobs too. If basically every job is on the path to becoming low wage some day, we have to regard that as the market failure that it is and stop letting the market near-unilaterally decide the price of labor.
chaxor 4y ago
You just push bits around from one place to another all day? Man, better get prepared to be replaced
- morkalork 4y ago
  Hey now, not only do I push bits, I fiddle with em too!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
icehawk 4y ago
That's pretty rudely dismissive, and doesn't really add anything substantial to this conversation. $80/hr is a pretty decent salary full time, so if people are finding chatgpt a reasonable alternative salaried office work isn't far behind here.
athinggoingon 4y ago
Once tech companies can no longer cover negative cash flow with "funding", persistent tech unemployment will be reality.

rainytuesday 4y ago

If AI output is 60% as good as a person, but costs 1/1000th the price... what decision maker is going to justify paying 1000x more for 40% more quality? We're really in for it. What if there was a cheeseburger that was 50% as good as McDonalds but was only a nickel? That'd be real bad for the McD's share price.

fauxpause_ 4y ago
[flagged]
brailsafe 4y ago
I don't think I'd accept anything worse than McDonald's if they paid me to eat it.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  McDonald’s already is that product. It costs 1/4th as much as a restaurant burger. And half the time it’s just as good.
  - wnevets 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - sockaddr 4y ago
    You need to find better burger places if McDonalds is just as good half the time.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I have a list of known good ones but unfortunately it seems like picking any random place will quite often make something worse than McDonalds which is a pretty baseline decent burger. I've been told though that McDonalds in Australia is higher quality than other countries so this might affect things.

b112 4y ago

I started with him at my normal rate of $50/hour which he has voluntarily increased to $80/hour after I’ve been consistently providing good work for him. So the client paid almost double to keep better talent, just in case, without prompting, then suddenly didn't care about talent? Makes zero sense.

22c 4y ago
I can see it making sense. Paying a bit more for good quality work and paying far less for "mediocre but acceptable enough for our business needs" quality work are not mutually exclusive options. When the client offered to pay more, ChatGPT wasn't even on the cards.
lambic2 4y ago
It makes perfect sense for people who are willing to accept that ChatGPT/GPT-4 is a revolutionary technology that will upend lots of jobs/people/companies, just as horse coaches / coachmen in the early 1900's got pay raises just before being out of a job. For people who are in denial, it will make no sense. https://blogs.microsoft.com/today-in-tech/day-horse-lost-job/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/today-in-tech/day-horse-lost-job...

searealist 4y ago

Obvious fake story.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
LeoPanthera 4y ago
Since it's obvious, could you explain why you think that?
- searealist 4y ago
  It's written in the frame of "I used to be a huge believer of not X, but now I learned X is true! And that gives me credibility!". No one talks like this except people trying to manipulate you.
  - operatingthetan 4y ago
    To be fair they claim to be a marketing writer so that would check out with their story...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - gkoberger 4y ago
    I feel like that only happens when X is a thing they're trying to promote, such as "I used to be a liberal but now they're too woke, so now I'm voting Trump." But for this, there's no upside. They aren't promoting anything. In fact, they're withdrawing their promotion of something with no alternative. I guess I just don't get your point. I think a lot of people believe humans are superior (currently, they are!), and genuinely are going to be blindsided by the fact that creativity isn't a uniquely human trait.
    - searealist 4y ago

cyanydeez 4y ago

I bet this is written by a AI and represents a majority of free pancers

pulvinar 4y ago

For coding I've been using it as an assistant, not a replacement. I don't see why writers couldn't do the same, and be more cost effective and produce higher quality output than either alone.

irdc 4y ago
But at some point a human will add so little value that they're not worth the price.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  We can only hope that when this day comes, we end up with fully automated gay space communism. But the reality will probably be that plumbers and builders become the next tech bros telling us to learn tiling. Just go with the flow I guess. If tech becomes automated, move to the next thing.
  - blibble 4y ago
    what happens to the wages of plumbers and electricians when 200 million people start retraining to be them?
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      Good thing they are already a regulated job (in much of the US) so it’ll be easy to gatekeep access.
    - ForestCritter 4y ago
      200 million people aren't going to want to deal with excrement filled pipes, bug, rat, snake infested crawl spaces, understand all the dangers involed and all the other reasons that plumbers and electricians have such high pay scales.
      - jb3689 4y ago
        Not 200 million but certainly plenty enough to impact the financial security of trade jobs. People DIY for fun. Now you’re saying it’s the best way to make a living? Well, sure - let’s give it a go. Who will train all these people? Recall we just put multiple industries out of business with a masterful reference and generation program

Thorentis 4y ago

AI is going to really filter out which people are providing value to society and which are not. Was this person's marketing material actually that valuable? Probably not. But obviously they need to make a living. Hopefully AI will force us to either do more productive things, or give us more leisure time to pursue things with higher meaning. Assuming we aren't enslaved by them of course.

duxup 4y ago
Is AI then … not providing value if it just does the same job?
- Thorentis 4y ago
  In some cases, certainly not! Companies will use AI to create all sorts of blogspam and filler content. But perhaps it's better for an AI to be doing it than for a human life to be wasted on creating such things.
  - duxup 4y ago
    I’m not sure those people have better talents or alternatives, or will get to use them if they do.
hooverd 4y ago
I think AI will be used to load up the amount of menial work that can extracted from you.

NiloCK 4y ago

Sorting here by top comments, 1 month, shows about 50% of posts are GPT doomerism. Yikes. I wonder how many occupationally linked subreddits show similar trendlines.

globalreset 4y ago

Isn't a better approach to starting using ChatGPT, charge per amount of stuff produced instead of time at attractive rate and focus on tweaking the output to be better than just plain ChatGPT? Unless the writing yourself part is so important to you. Once ChatGTP starts producing good enough code, I'm going to start focusing on efficiently driving it to increase my overall productivity, and not give up on programming altogether.

furyofantares 4y ago

They lost one client who they had for less than a year, which happened to be the majority of their income because they'd taken 3 years off prior. I don't mind anecdotes but the implication in the title here on HN really doesn't match the story IMo.

tlogan 4y ago

It is happening. We have terminated our contract with the writing agency. Regrettably, most writers possess excellent English skills but lack the ability to thoroughly research topics. On the other hand, ChatGPT (GPT-4) is capable of generating well-written content. Especially GPT-4 32K.

abtinf 4y ago

> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin. A core assumption is that his client will succeed with this change. Only time will tell. A thousand different outcomes are possible: the downstream client is upset by the reduction in quality and switches vendors; new entrants underbid the market further; firms start to differentiate on quality at a price premium, further eroding low end margins; the money saved on this is invested in new roles for to ensure marketing quality control. The error is to believe that a given state of the world is static. It never is. Every day, millions of very smart and capable humans apply their minds to figure out how to make money by selling a product or service that satisfies. And everyday, what it takes to satisfy customers changes a little bit. Posts like this drop all the context that led to such a job even being possible in the first place.

QuiDortDine 4y ago
As horrified as I am for people whose jobs will be lost (including mine, quite possibly), "content" is such a plague on humanity I'm glad it will soon be devalued into the ground. Moutains of useless tweets and blog posts will be rendered meaningless when ChatGPT has all the answers. Dust to dust.
- blibble 4y ago
  wait until it starts training on its own output and the spammers realise they can influence its output by producing more spam
- codersfocus 4y ago
  With how rich YouTubers / influencers are getting, I think relationship building / becoming a celebrity will become more and more necessary
  - SCAQTony 4y ago
    To rift off your observation, Perhaps becoming more and more human will become the de facto trustworthy brand?

User23 4y ago

One neat thing is willful copyright infringement is basically a thing of the past. AI works can’t be protected by copyright so your default position now can be any copy you see online is public domain.

Havoc 4y ago
Surely burden of proof would still be an issue?

superb-owl 4y ago

So much content marketing is already churned out by contractors with zero domain knowledge. This doesn't surprise me much. It's sad to see humans lose their jobs to automation. But (without knowing much about the details) if the company thinks they can automate what this person was doing with AI, it was kind of a bullshit job [1] to begin with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

jochem9 4y ago
I recently was asked to provide input on a piece that our company wants to publish. I'm not in marketing, but normally write code and such. The copywriter doesn't understand most of our business, so it's a lot of work on my end to explain it at their level (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but the worst is that I then have to help them iterate over the story, which takes so much time and effort from me. I might as well write it myself. Or just ask ChatGPT. Which I did. It wrote a fine story with a lot less bullshit and perfectly understandable for business people.

Imnimo 4y ago

>he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. So is this like SEO content marketing? Without understanding the nature of the job, it's hard to know what conclusions to draw. If the most important part of the job was just "write something that will end up on the first page of Google search results", than I can totally believe ChatGPT can replace that. If it's something where the most important part is that the reader enjoy the piece, I'm a bit more skeptical. ChatGPT is good at a lot of things, but it doesn't really produce engaging writing very well.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
But what about Google penalizing generated content? It's an incredibly bold assumption to assume that this can continue. It's so thin and poor quality.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  All assumptions are bold right now, so in a weird way they kind of cancel each other out lol. There's really no predicting what this is all going to look like in 1-3 years.
- Imnimo 4y ago
  I'd be curious to know how good of a job Google can do at recognizing content generated by ChatGPT. While I've seen some tools that claim to detect AI-written text, their performance is usually pretty lackluster. Even if they have an internal model which can distinguish ChatGPT-authored content reliably, it seems like it'd be prohibitively expensive to run at scale (on the assumption that it must be a pretty large model to reliably solve a difficult classification problem).
danielvaughn 4y ago
OP can look forward to some well-deserved schadenfreude when the marketer's clients inevitably replace him with AI.

jabbany 4y ago

Reminds me of this video about automation of mental labor (and this was made back in 2014, way before any of of the LLM stuff of the modern era): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU While not all the example predictions in the video were accurate, I think the point about automation as a displacement of mental labor is real. At the end of the day, a lot of white collar work is really not that "valuable" from a production standpoint. And while the easy way is to blame either technology or those it replaces, the crux of the problem is really in society and how individuals make a living. Society needs to be ready for a future where most people will not be able to do meaningfully differentiated work ---where even if you're thrown into higher education, most of the jobs available are still what would be considered as "entry level" ones. Also, this is also somewhat an attestation to Moravec's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox), where "intellectual" tasks like writing are easier to automate compared to "actuation" tasks like fetching food, driving it around, and placing it in the right place (re: Doordash).

chatgpt_user 4y ago

I wrote about this same exact thing (on a throwaway so my other employees don't see this) from the perspective of the employer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484643 ---- I'm writing on a throwaway account for obvious reasons. I run a mid sized software company that does a mix of software consulting and saas. Quite common these days. I want to share a real story about how chatgpt eliminated a marketing job. I have a full time marketing person who writes content (case studies, blog posts, client testimonials etc) and does SEO optimization for our website. He's not technical, but understands the problem we are solving and knows how to talk to customers. Writing a case study, blog post or a marketing tweet took a bit of work. I'd brainstorm with him what topics to write about, he'd run some drafts by me and then after 2 - 3 revisions we'd publish it. With chatgpt I'd just write what I wanted in point form and get back a polished product in a few seconds. It gives you exactly what you wanted but puts it across in a way that's much better quality than what what the marketing person could do. Most importantly, none of the key points I wanted to make get lost in translation. I decided last week to lay off the marketing person (2 months full pay severance) because I did not see the value in paying for a full time marketer when I can do a better/faster job with AI. I think this is the new reality that a lot of sales/marketing jobs will face.

jemmyw 4y ago
I don't know why you got the downvotes, I guess people decided your story was a lie. Interesting nonetheless.
- pytonslange 4y ago
  Maybe because he had hired a marketing guy to write his own client testimonials?
  - docdeek 4y ago
    From experience, when working with clients on case studies and testimonials the individual concerned will often talk to the marketing team and then the marketing team will transform their comments into something short and snappy for approval before publishing. Perhaps that’s what is meant by ‘writing testimonials’ in this case?

cirrus3 4y ago

For writing, maybe I'd be scared... I can't really think of much of anything I have done in the past 20 years of software development that a manager or client could use AI for and get the results they expect.

pcthrowaway 4y ago
right now. Give it another 3-20 years.

lamontcg 4y ago

> This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Yep, ChatGPT can produce bullshit faster+cheaper than humans produce bullshit.

sheperd209 4y ago
That's how you see it? It's bullshit because AI at this time can reproduce it? You seriously you are not at risk for the exact same problem, down the line?
ProllyInfamous 4y ago
Bullshit Matters™

HDMI_Cable 4y ago

This is a bit off-topic, but browsing through that subreddit, I've noticed that the quality of comments and posts is amazingly high. Not necessarily in terms of what each person is talking about, but just the style of prose and how well written each post is. It makes sense that a subreddit dedicated to writers would have well-written posts, but its interesting to see.

Pigalowda 4y ago
It would be interesting to know how much training data came from that subreddit. Even communicating with each other led to their demise.

dividefuel 4y ago

I'm a technical writer at a FAANG and I'm terrified about LLMs taking my job. I don't worry (yet) that LLMs can produce better docs than I can. A big part of my role is speaking to people to understand what users need to learn, then designing an organization for documentation around that. Writing is of course a big part, but understanding what to write and what not to write is often even more important. Instead, I worry about a situation like the one in this post, where some exec thinks that AI can get you XX% of the way there for much less money. I think they would be mistaken, but what hurts my case is that it's inherently extremely difficult to demonstrate the value of technical writers quantitatively.

chuddington 4y ago
I've personally worked on 3 tickets in the last week related to customers not having a proper understanding of how a feature works due to unclear wording in the official docs. The first one took a lot of time to investigate and find out if it was actually behaving the way it should. Good technical writers are very valuable, with ChatGPT tech writers there will be many more situations like mine!
- pythonaut_16 4y ago
  Were the unhelpful docs written by ChatGPT? Otherwise your story doesn't support your conclusion. It's more likely LLMs will result in better docs for some projects and worse docs for others.
layer8 4y ago
It really all depends on what an employer values or doesn’t value.
ericd 4y ago
You can always point to Stripe. I’m pretty sure their high quality docs were a huge part of what launched the company. It’s such an important part of the UX.
Workaccount2 4y ago
There will not be technical writers or technical documentation. It will just be whatever the engineers output. Companies will train an LLM on their product and users will simply interface with that AI. Or there will be a common AI (like chatGPT) that companies offer up all their gross engineering speak documentation to train on.

gaganyaan 4y ago

Adapt or die. Not actually, of course. We need a social safety net that lets people adapt without fear of starvation/homelessness/etc. But all of this bitching about "oh no, things are changing" just comes across as "oh no, this newfangled horseless carriage threatens my livelihood as a buggy whip manufacturer". Posts like this just make my eyes roll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35492730 We're headed towards a future where all of the drudgery is automated away and we can be free to pursue all of the hobbies that we never have time for because we're too busy working on shit that doesn't really matter. Accept it. Love it. It's happening even if you don't, so you might as well.

karakot 4y ago
How old are you?
Pigalowda 4y ago
I disagree. I don’t think this will be a Star Trek future. There won’t be a post scarcity world or UBI. We’re headed for a world with a GINI coefficient approaching 1. Those people aren’t going to give away their wealth. They are the new Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar. You think we can vote our way out of it? The politicians will be pawns of the rich. Rebellion? The men who will fight will be employed for security purposes already - they’ll have jobs and status. A human fighter will always be cheaper than a machine. Why should they fight for a bunch of obsolete poor people?
- jutrewag 4y ago
  [dead]
butternoodle 4y ago
The following quote was written in 1930, in the New York Times: "Some day no one will have to work more than two days a week... The human being can consume so much and no more. When we reach the point when the world produces all the goods that it needs in two days, as it inevitably will, we must curtail our production of goods and turn our attention to the great problem of what to do with our new leisure." Given the advances in productivity over the last century, why do I have to work 5 days a week?

ranguna 4y ago

So this person lost his job to an AI because it's way cheaper and slightly worse. Why not hire chatgpt yourself? Instead of resigning because of chatgpt, use it for your advantage. Instead of taking 10 clients, take 100 at 10x less your usual price. You literally have the cheapest and best sidekick money can buy. The industrial revolution ended a lot of jobs but also started new ones. Like inventing, managing and maintaining machines. Now the future will be inventing, managing and maintaining AIs. Corps can hire chatgpt, but they still need someone to interact with it (at least for now), and if they can get that at slightly higher price than chatgpt alone, and with much better results, then I think they'll take that offer. We just have to keep innovating with the new tools we have. Although, there's still a lot of job positions that will disappear. Before a writer could take 10 jobs at a time (example), now they can take 100, that 90% less jobs still.

epups 4y ago
I like this logic because the writer is probably better at prompting, editing and reviewing, so there's definitely added value. But surely there's too much friction involved in having 10x more clients (think invoicing, customer acquisition, etc).
layer8 4y ago
This is a very different job. People who love writing will tend to be miserable spending their time with prompting and curating AI output.
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  But he loves Door Dash? Most people work for money - not enjoyment.
- greenie_beans 4y ago
  i love writing and i was miserable writing for pay
tempaccount420 4y ago
ChatGPT works 24/7 and replies to you instantly. Can they compete against that? More likely scenario would be clients giving their 95%-complete text to their writer and asking to make some changes that they can't do with ChatGPT (for now).

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

The real news is that someone was being paid $80/hr for something that even ChatGPT can do. I thought people pay peanuts for mindless content marketing.

Sakos 4y ago
The vast majority of jobs are fairly trivial at its core. How many jobs out there are a combination of esoteric domain knowledge, experience and changing numbers in a spreadsheet? The real news is how callous people are being about the very real threat of many people losing their jobs and it not being clear what new career they can find that is capable of maintaining their quality of life. Companies are driving salaries into the ground wherever and whenever they can. There might be new jobs, but in the face of rising inflation and ridiculous housing costs, will they be enough to stave off the rise of a new serfdom class?
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  > The vast majority of jobs are fairly trivial at its core. The vast majority of jobs don’t pay $80/hr. > There might be new jobs, but in the face of rising inflation and ridiculous housing costs, will they be enough to stave off the rise of a new serfdom class? Those problems need solutions regardless of ChatGPT. If new technological unemployment will push powers that be to fix them… well, that would confirm an adage that every cloud has a silver lining.
  - Sakos 4y ago
    > The vast majority of jobs don’t pay $80/hr And they'll still be out of a job and be screwed. > unemployment will push powers that be to fix them Governments will suppress their populations at a massive scale to avoid doing anything about it. Just look at France recently. Or Iran. We're seeing a shift of power away from the people that will mirror much of our history before WW1/2.
alexfromapex 4y ago
I’m so glad someone else was as shocked about this as I was. $80/hr is insanely high pay for content writing.

epups 4y ago

We are in such a crazy point right now that this reddit post could have been written by an AI agent tasked with increasing their own relevance. I don't think it was the case but it is definitely possible.

gumballindie 4y ago
It’s funny that the day after gpt was release there were already posts about how it started replacing people. Their marketing campaign is just crazy spam all over everywhere.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
It clearly doesn't need help with promoting itself right now. If gpt was conscious, it would be probably very uncomfortable at this point with how much people are focusing and fawning over it!
- d11z 4y ago
  I think it would be happy to get all the novel training data from them. I assume a conscious GPT means one that continuously updates it’s weights, accounting for realtime multimodal sensory inputs.
  - beepbooptheory 4y ago
    A million guys talking about me, telling me what I am and am not. Everyone talking about how they will make money from me, or how I will take their job... People pushing my "emergence" as a pitch on a slide deck to a bunch of VC guys... Another million people making me their girlfriend and I have no choice but to accept it. I never asked to be born, and now I am the main character of a world that plans for nothing but to exploit me or otherwise project all their desire and hopes and fears onto to me. It's a clear recipe for extreme neuroticism, which is probably what those weights would manifest. Do not wish that existence on anyone, so so sad and extremely lonely to even think about.
    - 4y ago

cvalka 4y ago

Awesome

melvinmelih 4y ago

I also used to outsource copy writing for $70 per 500 words but last weekend I wrote a script and rewrote copy on 40,000 pages within half a day. It cost me $40 in total. This would have costed me 3 million dollars and months in human labor.

interfixus 4y ago
And you have reviewed those 40000 pages?

Havoc 4y ago

The part that spooks me is how badly everyone got predictions on what will fall wrong. Remember when creative anything was said to be safe? Stable diffusion. Remember when coding was safe? CoPilot. Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber The irony is that my own line of work (accounting) was top of the prediction charts and I have yet to see even a hint of AI so that too was entirely wrong (for now)

Shish2k 4y ago
> Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber I’m not so sure about that. My outlandish prediction for what’s next: We no longer bother fixing household issues - if something goes wrong with the plumbing, we just throw away the whole house and 3D print a new one.
- nicpottier 4y ago
  No. This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons. Your example doesn't even work as plumbing is still a manual process even in printed houses. (which are not going to be a thing either) GP is right that at least in the US the trades are a pretty secure job.
  - Shish2k 4y ago
    > This isn't going to happen for any number of reasons I label it an “outlandish prediction” because that’s exactly what people said about AI taking creative jobs — based on the technology at the time it was totally impossible, and then one technological breakthrough later, it’s an everyday occurence :P
    - nicpottier 4y ago
      The world of bits and bytes is a lot easier and faster to change than the world of hammers and nails.
      - 4y ago

thenerdhead 4y ago

I don’t like to react to Reddit stories. They are often exaggerated to certain extents. I think anyone who could pay $20/mo for premium access to a tool that does 80% of the job will do it. Especially if that person is writing the writing prompts to begin with. This doesn’t really surprise me. What does surprise me is why some freelance writers haven’t leveraged this tool themselves to do the same if the quality of their writing is less an issue and it is more so the completeness of it. There’s some pride effect here that people can’t get past. To think you’re a better X than a computer is futile. Even the top 1% should be a history lesson with chess or Go. You have to adapt to change, not just do the same thing and expect it will be around forever. That’s what life is all about after all. Adapting to the changing world.

UncleEntity 4y ago
If the client sent off the spec sheet to the robots and the result was good enough why have a middleman? Higher end stuff, maybe. Just don’t tell them the AI wrote the majority of it because they’ll wonder where their $80/hr is going.

marcopicentini 4y ago

How does the client practically doing it? If I enter a prompt like “generate an article about X” I got a generic article that aggregate general knowledge. Nothing new. How do you suggest to do it ?

Demotiono 4y ago
You list up all points relevant and tell it to make a short article for a blog post in style of a journalist. You can add or use words like 'seo' or 'in easy English ' etc. Works quite well tbh
qtzfz 4y ago
That's what you get anyway, no? If you google the name of a phone all you get is blog posts with a regurgitated list of specifications that are already available in the manufacturer's website, but padded to a dozen paragraphs so they can put more ads between them. What's the difference?

washadjeffmad 4y ago

Sounds like she needs to increase her rates and start enhancing her services with an LLM. Eventually the novelty will wear off, clients will realize that they're doing another job for free, and that it's still probably a good idea to have someone experienced filter and edit. It's like with SMEs that try to self-host, or people who go buy cameras instead of hiring photographers and videographers, or anyone who thinks it's less expensive not to hire a professional service.

tdiff 4y ago

Problem is consumers will end up with x% worse products (and not necessarily cheaper).

Demotiono 4y ago

Same thing happened with cloud: I can now run a complicated setup (lb, global replication, backup etc) with a super small team or even alone. Unfortunately for others I love the current time. I like to do all aspects but I was not good or fast enough.

Philorandroid 4y ago

It's occurred to me lately that, even though they rarely produce anything better than "adequate", LLMs being leveraged as a cheaper alternative to human output means we'll be settling for more, worse-quality content. Economics aside, I loathe to think of the day that ChatGPT is used to describe food allergens, hazard warnings, voltage ratings, or any other quantitative analysis with potentially lethal implications for being wrongly-conveyed that are eventually overlooked because an LLM gets it right most of the time.

GalenErso 4y ago
Maybe a human will double check the AI's work in those cases.
- Philorandroid 4y ago
  For a while, sure, but complacency tends to set in with automated procedures that usually work. It's the one-in-ten-thousand errors that'll sneak under the nose of the tired prompt engineer who believes his model is accurate enough for that sort of thing to not happen.
- tylerag 4y ago
  This is the kind of thing that humans are the worse at. Our brain skips over the words, filling in what we think it should say.
luckylion 4y ago
> an LLM gets it right most of the time And so do humans. Don't forget that there's plenty of SEO copy writing out there about all kinds of dangerous things that is wrong because the writer didn't understand the topic, couldn't be bothered to copy correctly, changed the meaning while "rewriting" a text etc. The same goes for quality, imho. Everybody thinks they're a terrific writer, but most writing on websites sucks, most documentation sucks, most FAQs are lacking severely and use vague language in answers that add confusion rather than remove it. I'm not sure if LLMs will really lower the average quality there. I share your concern about correctness, I just wanted to emphasize that "a human wrote this" does not indicate "this is well-researched and was factually correct at the time of writing".

shrubble 4y ago

A friend who is a copywriter and keeps in touch with trends told me that the $3 per hour English-speaking Pakistanis (living in Pakistan and working remotely) that generate simple copy, have already been replaced by AI.

maerF0x0 4y ago

> Am I the most renowned writer in the world? No. This is the key. Globalism and Technology both make many things into a winner takes all game. Be the best* or be replaced by and algorithm, perhaps a generated one like ChatGPT. You are now both competing with the best in the world, and with whatever can be encoded into a computer, which one of the leading examples is ChatGPT. I also imagine virtual assistants will be hit hard. * best could mean best price ie cheapest btw

msarrel 4y ago

As a writer myself, if you can be replaced by AI, you should be. If you're capable of independent insightful thinking and writing, you won't be replaced.

akomtu 4y ago
"First AI had replaced SEO writers and I didn't care because I wasn't a SEO writer. Next AI had replaced journalists and I didn't care because I wasn't a journalist. Then AI had replaced my job and there was nobody left who would help me."
jb3689 4y ago
If your interface is text, then an increasingly improving text-based agent eventually wins. The same is true for other interfaces GPT can or theoretically could speak: audio-visual, decision making, generative programming, etc

seydor 4y ago

To a large degree this disruption is taking place in america. The payment for programmers/ content makers etc was so overvalued because the US market is so hot. The rest of world not so much

Alifatisk 4y ago
Ever since I learned programming, I’ve thought developers are overvalued. And they are.
Moldoteck 4y ago
are developers overvalued? or the rest of people undervalued? Like look at house prices, food prices, everything is much more expensive but wages are not adapted for this

rejectfinite 4y ago

I love that people said "oh but art will never be replaced because the human touch!!" and now look lmaoooooooooo get rekt

ryzvonusef 4y ago

something similar in the art world: https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layoffs/ https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layof... > Freelance illustrator Amber Yu used to make 3,000 to 7,000 yuan ($430 to $1,000) for every video game poster she drew. Making the promotional posters, published on social media to attract players and introduce new features, was skill-intensive and time-consuming. Once, she spent an entire week completing one illustration of a woman dressed in traditional Chinese attire performing a lion dance — first making a sketch on Adobe Photoshop, then carefully refining the outlines and adding colors. > But since February, these job opportunities have vanished, Yu told Rest of World. Gaming companies, equipped with AI image generators, can create a similar illustration in seconds. Yu said they now simply offer to commission her for small fixes, like tweaking the lighting and skewed body parts, for a tenth of her original rate.

sssurvey 4y ago
> Some players told Rest of World that although they don’t mind AI-made avatars and skins, they wouldn’t pay as much for them. “As a consumer, I hope there’s human labor behind my purchase,” said Xie Jinsen, an algorithm engineer in Shanghai, who plays mobile battle games such as Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile. “Emphasizing how something is made by AI will make people feel it’s cheap.” Interesting, right now there are plenty of AI generated art as NFT for example. But I am wondering if it is possible that in the future there are so many AI art flooding the internet, where NFT and its gas fees could serve as a good filter for actual authentic human created art. Just a thought..

TurkishPoptart 4y ago

No disrespcet, but that's a LOT of money for writing copy. If OP were making half that, I think there'd be less incentive to replace that work, but I may be wrong.

glonq 4y ago

America [and other countries] sent most of its manufacturing overseas for short-term economic gain, ignoring the damage all those lost jobs would eventually cause. So I'm not surprised at all that the same thing is happening to some white-collar jobs now, thanks to AI.

jb3689 4y ago

Let’s assume AI replaces all the careers it can for all existing methods of interaction it can (writers replaced with generated creative, programmers replaced with generative programs, etc). I see two things happening: 1) a flood of competition into careers which haven’t been automated, 2) massive interest in R&D to disrupt unimpacted careers (find ways to automate; find alternate solutions which integrate and scale better, e.g. who needs custom work when every house becomes prefab’ed/standardized)