10 ms·

> The differential value of being better at putting words in a row just dropped to nothing. Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can. Thi

> The differential value of being better at putting words in a row just dropped to nothing. Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can. This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a writer is. Writers communicate ideas. Their ideas. Clearly. They can use a pencil, a typewriter, write in French, use pictographs, use a spell checker, use ChatGPT, hire a ghostwriter. If you’re really a writer, all that matters is the end result and I can guarantee you that people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a row will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day, but those people won’t be “writers.” Also, I still maintain that I can communicate ideas significantly faster by just typing them than by using a tool like ChatGPT. When the ideas are clear, the writing is easy. It’s one of the fundamental powers of writing: It can almost move at the speed of thought.

PaulHoule 3y ago
There’s the difference between being a writer and managing writers. If you are writing yourself it is at the speed of thought, if you are hiring somebody else to write you can possibly free yourself up to increase your throughput but you are going to spend time communicating expectations and reading/editing the results. If you develop a good relationship with the writer the effort to do all that can be small but if you don’t it sure can be tiring. (e.g. the New York Times has a strong and consistent style enforced in editing, people who write regularly for that paper learn to write in that style to make the editor’s job easier, people who write occasionally for that paper get their work seriously mangled by the editor)
sremani 3y ago
You are ignoring the fact that most of the writers are bullshit vendors regurgitating books, quotes, themes and things they read from somewhere else. If anything ChatGPT will basically filter out these sophists because it is a Chad-Sophist. The important thing now, is "depth" of knowledge. Of course, good generalists with wide array of mental models have their jiggle, but in the world of LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge trumps.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > but in the world of LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge trumps My favorite book genre is roughly “Academic writes popular book after 20 years of researching a topic”. That will be very hard to replace with ChatGPT. Someone like Gladwell though … yeah I can see LLMs being scary for that genre. Not quite yet, but soon.
  - ebiester 3y ago
    Gladwell's strength is that he's an incredible storyteller. It will be a while before an LLM gets to that level.
    - Swizec 3y ago
      You are right. The stories are fantastic and he really makes the underlying research shine. I can see LLM + Human working great for that kind of writing. LLM writes the first draft, human makes it sing.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Well, Gladwell constructs great stories out of a very selective reading of research. Not that many writers don't do this to some degree, but Gladwell in his more recent career has been widely criticized for picking specific research and constructing a compelling narrative from it as opposed to telling a more nuanced tale.
- chasing 3y ago
  Yes, content farms will be able to produce low-value content even more cheaply. Any “writer” who leans too hard on ChatGPT will find themselves producing material that feels indistinguishable from all the other low-value crap that floods the internet.
- paulcole 3y ago
  > You are ignoring the fact that most of the writers are bullshit vendors regurgitating books, quotes, themes and things they read from somewhere else. I don't understand the vitriol HN has for professional writers and anyone who might work in gasp marketing. Replace "writers" with "programmers" and your statement is still true but you don't hear it being shouted from the rooftops on every post about programming on HN.
benatkin 3y ago
Maybe some of the remaining 10% was reserved for writing. But I feel like it should be more like 50% in his case so it's a fair interpretation.
symlinkk 3y ago
The vast majority of paid writers are just summarizing other people’s thoughts. Like people writing marketing blog posts are just writing what the CEO tells them to, etc.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Not to mention the content farms that just produce junk to ruin Google search results.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  Right, most professional writers (and editors) are working on commercial, not-particularly-creative content of one form or another. Ad copy, docs, internal training manuals, reports, powerpoints for the execs to read (LOL), memos, that kind of shit. Corporations and governments throw off an absolute fuckton of writing per year, a fair bit of it created, or at least edited, by writing & editing professionals. All of that just got way easier to do. A lot of it can now be done by people who couldn't have, before, because a machine can fix their writing so it's sufficiently non-shit to be acceptable for many purposes. The rest, that still needs some decent writer or editor involved, is likely to see a huge increase in per-worker productivity, which will either result in similar levels of employment with far higher total output, or... in most of the people doing it now, having to switch careers. My expectation is that we'll just turn editors into writers-who-also-edit—aided throughout by AI tools—and have non-writers take on writing as part of their job (see: what happened to secretaries—we're all secretaries, now) and most of the writers are going to be out of a job. I reckon this'll hit commercial writing (where most of the writing jobs are) and high-volume-low-value fiction writing (e.g. the romance novel scene, middle-grades shared-penname book series, that kind of thing) hardest. Ghostwriters, too—one who embraces AI tools and uses them well will be able to do the work of five or more who don't, so we'll need far fewer people doing that work.
lucideer 3y ago
> but those people won’t be “writers.” Not by your definition maybe, but that misses the point made in the article: > why did I conclude that 90% of my skills had become (economically) worthless? The op has inserted a specific word here in braces because this isn't a question of what defines a writer, it's a question of who gets paid to write. By that definition, what defines a writer is not for you to decide, it's decided by the market. And the market, in my experience, is not particularly concerned with quality.
- lbotos 3y ago
  The market is wide and diverse. People who have money will always pay a premium for quality. With regards to writing, if you can create quality information with AI faster than before, you will be more profitable. If you are going wide, and throwing spaghetti at the wall with crappy writing, you may also be able to generate $1 from a million people vs. $10,000 from 100 people. AI threatens the middle for sure, and will force all of us to change our strategies.
  - lucideer 3y ago
    You have significantly more faith in the market than I. > People who have money will always pay a premium for quality. The assumption here is that the Venn of "people who have money" and "people who can recognise / care about quality" is closer to a circle than a figure eight - that has not been my experience.
    - qikInNdOutReply 3y ago
      It also assumes that quality can not be archieved with chat gpt via quantity. Like "Make me 20 webpages with this topic", then let them test & evaluate by amazon clickwork, then regenerate with the base of the best 3 till quality goal is reached.
      - lucideer 3y ago
        Ha. Well, yeah - I guess we're even calling into question the very definition of the word quality here. Your comment seems to imply that quality is a metric that correlates with quantitative metrics of mass appeal, rather than personal & individually diverse concepts of subjective quality, which would be more what I was referring to. But both can be equally valid given the context.
ebiester 3y ago
I think there's more than that. As someone who has written millions of words in my life, I agree with you - the mechanical transformation of my ideas is not the hard part. However, there will be people who haven't developed their own style or their own fluency in the mechanical transformation, and now they have the ability to do so almost as well as I can. An expert reader will be able to tell the difference. But assume that these people have read and understand the subject but have not put the millions of words together yet. At some point, it will become like a calculator. I can multiply 20% off a dinner bill faster than getting the calculator out, but people won't spend the time learning the mental math and they will do just as good a job.
- nevir 3y ago
  I do think that this is going to make it a LOT more difficult for people to build up the kind of experience that folks like you have. The barrier to entry to the role just got a lot lower, but the barrier to gaining enough experience to become a specialist just dramatically jumped up
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Yes exactly this, Stephen King will always be Stephen King. You can get chatgpt to generate something like Stephen King, but people know about him and his brand/style so it feels like cheap imitation. Everyone else? They won't get the ability to establish their brand/style (assuming chatgpt gets faster at updating with recent information/sources). I can see us relying far more on centralized institutions (again). Only reading from certain publishing houses, writers focusing more on trying to get into a certain house vs content of their work.
    - jdmichal 3y ago
      > I can see us relying far more on centralized institutions (again). Yes. In an age of abundant junk, curation of the gems can be a successful strategy.
      - 3y ago
riwsky 3y ago
If you don’t have an editor or aren’t rewriting your prose, you may indeed be communicating faster and clearer than most people—but not at the level the author talks about. Going back and hunting for strong, crisp verbs is not some crutch for weak writers; it’s the minimum standard of care when writing something for mass consumption.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >it’s the minimum standard of care when writing something for mass consumption You'd be very, very, surprised.
  - riwsky 3y ago
    I'm with you, don't worry. I meant that standard normatively, not positively, and am in no danger of believing that most mass writings meet it.
- ptero 3y ago
  > Going back and hunting for strong, crisp verbs is not some crutch for weak writers; it’s the minimum standard of care when writing something for mass consumption. For mass consumption, sure. But the best writers almost never wrote for mass consumption. Some of them did acquire a mass following, but it usually was not a goal; their goal was to communicate the ideas they developed to a potentially interested audience. Ads and dark patterns are their enemies, they distract readers from ideas the writer wants to convey. The last few decades saw a meteoric rise of blogs and other forms of writing. A small portion created something new, but the vast majority were regurgitating old ideas in a (slightly) new light or peddling outrage. I will not cry if 90% of those writers stop writing. This will also increase chances that whoever is still writing does so because he has ideas to capture, not because he optimizes for money and is happy to push ads or ideas based on today's ROI. My 2c.
  - riwsky 3y ago
    You misunderstand me: I agree that lazy SEO spammers are poor writers. My beef is with the GP's dismissal of writing slower than the speed of thought—when the best writers pore over these things more, not less. Quoting Thomas Mann, the 1929 Nobel Prize winner in Literature: "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
throw1234651234 3y ago
ChatGPT has failed me on code* I also run text through it. It is NOT good enough to convey what a good writer can. If anything, it reads like an over-zealous A student that was never too bright, just followed all the rules. That's the best case, where it doesn't completely misinterpret. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648167
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Seconding this. The code it generated even for basic stuff like an NGINX config is a complete waste of time, even when you feed it documentation for stuff like URL rewrites, it will just hallucinate things that don't exist. Worthless.
coldtea 3y ago
>This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a writer is. Writers communicate ideas. That's kind of irrelevant. People paying others for writing gigs just care about words on a page, covering a certain topic. Doesn't have to be artistic or to contain novel ideas. So, regardless if some writers make it, hundreds of thousands of people currently making a living writing copy can (and will be/are) replaced by AI text. If it gets a little better at creatively rewriting news agency feeds, many journalists will too (that's like what a huge number of journalists do, and not original reporting). At best they will be reduced, for less and more precarious pay, to glorified prompt writers and checkers. >If you’re really a writer Yes, and real true Scotsmen will be fine too. The rest, less real Scotsmen, not so much.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  The people that could be theoretically replaced by AI text could already have been replaced by Fiverr contractors or Mechanical Turk workers, but by and large we don't see it. If someone is able to delegate a task to a $5 worker or a 50 cent API call, and produce meaningful output, fine. But we have no such examples of tasks being able to be magically delegated in such a way that creates a cohesive, meaningful, broad whole publishing company and product together. Nobody has used Fiverr to replace the NYT editorial staff with a paper that's just as successful. And I don't think NYT would find value in delegating their article creation to ChatGPT either. Context, collaboration, high level planning, fact checking, deep understanding of market mechanics and sentiment, raw talent, etc, matter for writing news. I'm not even a fan of NYT or most modern journalism (I hate yellow journalism), but I don't think you can automate away an institution with a couple of GPT bots. I know everyone is breathlessly assuming that's the case today, but nobody is producing anything compelling. "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" as the saying goes. But for some reason GPT heads think that equation has been flipped. I don't buy it.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >The people that could be theoretically replaced by AI text could already have been replaced by Fiverr contractors or Mechanical Turk workers, but by and large we don't see it. Tons of writers and graphic designers and such are already replaced by Fiverr contractors and other similar cheapo gig workers. >Nobody has used Fiverr to replace the NYT editorial staff with a paper that's just as successful. That would be like the last holdout. A good 90% of websites don't have such quality consraints or reservations. It's like someone say "AI will replace graphic designers" and someone replying that David Carson wont have a problem. Duh, but most jobs don't go to the handful of David Carson's of the trade (or even anybody 1/100th as famous)...
Quinner 3y ago
This was illustrated by comparing his written argument, which was compelling, to the ChatGPT transcripts, which were insipid and bland, even when given the germ of an interesting point. Maybe in a year ChatGPT will be retrained on a million AI thinkpieces and it will be able to construct an essay with some interesting points. But humans need to come up with and communicate those interesting points first.
- neltnerb 3y ago
  I think this is an excellent point. It will write great think-pieces as soon as humans come up with thinks to be trained on.
- jdmichal 3y ago
  This is why I call ChatGPT a mirror. And it's a really damn good mirror. But even the best mirror can only reflect that which already exists.
mikewarot 3y ago
>If you’re really a writer, all that matters is the end result and I can guarantee you that people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a row will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day, but those people won’t be “writers.” For a historical comparison, the same could be said of photography. You have to know instinctively what makes a great photograph if you're going to have a hope of making them on a regular basis, or for pay. The gear really doesn't matter much, it's just table stakes. Having GPT spit out some new combinations of words can help you get around writers block, or expand your vocabulary, but I strongly agree it won't automatically make you a writer.
- swalling 3y ago
  Photography is a great example here, because it seems pretty possible that generative models do to writing what smartphones did to photography.
  - haswell 3y ago
    Photographers are still doing photography for the same reasons we always were. People who want to take pictures no longer need to be photographers. I think it’s interesting to look at, but I think the parallels break down pretty quickly. The decline of legacy photographic equipment and the reduction of skill needed to take photos is all about a rather technical skillset becoming less and less necessary. The smartphone also made many other legacy things irrelevant for most people. Language and writing are closer to the core of humanity in a rather existential way. It’s less clear that reducing the skillset required to participate in writing is a net benefit, even if it enables the generation of more text by people who might not have done so before. Smartphones make a photographer’s job easier and a non-photographer’s goals possible. I worry that the same can’t be said for language models and the end result is likely to be closer to a new form of illiteracy than it is to the democratization of a process that formerly required greater degrees of technical skill. When painting broad strokes, I see the similarity. Drilling down even a little widens the conceptual gap quite a bit.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
Freire_Herval 3y ago
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LanceH 3y ago
>people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a row will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day We already see this with book after book churned out with no real story attached. There are already way more people who write well and have little to say.
tshaddox 3y ago
It seems like your definition of “writer” is closer to my definition of “excellent writer.” But I think those are much rarer.
joe_the_user 3y ago
Also, I still maintain that I can communicate ideas significantly faster by just typing them than by using a tool like ChatGPT. But vast number of people don't get paid, for writing that communicates but rather for spewing words that vaguely cover a topic, writing that's a rewrite of already written policies in a different formats (FAQ versus Mission Statement versus etc) or marketing newsletters that want high-value adjectives put together in a plausible way. ChatGPT can apparently do all this. I wouldn't count on less people being employed versus more pap being produced but we'll see.
scotty79 3y ago
I see ChatGPT mostly as another invention in terms of bringing words to people after texting, internet, newspapers, printing press, books and writing itself. It's funny that each time people were criticizing each new such technology that it's so easy that people will produce so much garbage content that humanity will drown in it.
Waterluvian 3y ago
This misrepresentation of what writing is, is something I very commonly see in software. People often think software dev is about coding. In reality, while software developers probably enjoy the act of coding, it’s rarely the interesting or difficult part. It’s just the rendering you do to bring all the work you did to life.
- psyklic 3y ago
  Even with "just coding", a skilled coder can translate thoughts directly to code more precisely and faster than translating them first to imperfect English.
  - aequitas 3y ago
    I still have to find a programming language that allows me to convey all the nuances of my thoughts and considerations only through code (and keep it readable and concise). This is why there there are few (no?) languages that don't allow for comments in natural language.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      The original-ish Lisp had no comments I believe. The workaround was a nop "comment macro" though. I guess it was more common in the card data days where you could write comments by hand on the card.
  - zeroimpl 3y ago
    I know it sometimes feels easier to just implement something than file a JIRA ticket with enough detail to describe what needs to be done.
- hangonhn 3y ago
  As I've progressed in my career, I find this to be more and more true. I would say most days I spend only 50% or less of my time writing code. Even when I do write code, the volume isn't huge. The challenges for me these days is in evolving existing systems without disrupting the business and designing and then implementing things that people can build on top of. The work is still very technical but a lot of it involves researching and planning and testing out hypotheses.
deeviant 3y ago
Everybody can have ideas, even people that aren't writers. A writer is a good at the translation from idea to paper, which is what LLMs are uniquely suited to assist. I have already used LLMs to publish my first book. Specifically, I used sudowrite + chatGPT. LLMs are a true equalizer in writing. Correcting grammar, improving and rephrasing wording, and even helping to brainstorm and organize.
s_dev 3y ago
Tech rarely brings everyone up to the same level but rather empowers those with knowledge even further. Basically writers now have tool that is as powerful as Google was to researchers. So I completely agree the author is mistaken here.
- Mezzie 3y ago
  It's great for writers with writer's block or those of us who are better editors than writers. I can use Chat-GPT to produce something bad, but the way it's bad gives me a great place to start.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  Many writers are experts in something but what about the vast swathes of writers that are just writers?
hyperman1 3y ago
I don't think he claims this is being a writer. He calls it word smithing, not writing. Word smithing is a part of writing, but far from the only part. To compare, as a C programmer a spent a lot of time creating custom collections: arrays, linked lists, ... Then in the 1990's, C++ with templates came along, and had it all built in. I feared this, initally: Some technical fears,e.g. would the compiler produce something reasonable? Deeper ones were psychological: Would I still have interesting work to do? Looking back on these worries makes me look silly. Of course there was interesting programming work left after I stopped manual collection creation. In fact, it forced me to level up, made me more productive. Today, I consider a language without built-in collections as inferior. Technology did this to all of us again and again. Banks had rooms full of human computers, calculating interests on paper. They were obsoleted by mainframes calculating a whole bank's worth of interests in less than a week. Then the spreadsheet came along, where people could simulate a week of finance batch runs in minutes. I think writing is safe. We will still value people capable of communicate a book worth of ideas. Only now there is a tool capable of taking angry word salad and turning it into readable sentences. We all have to go trough an uncomfortable time leveling up, and in 5 years ChatGPT is the new normal and our worries will look silly.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
I think this might be a common misunderstanding of writing. Lots of people want to be writers and seem to focus on writing as a craft, as if once you get good enough at writing you will start having interesting ideas. To me, a writer is someone with interesting ideas who learned to write well, not someone good at writing who learned to have interesting ideas. The latter is infinitely less trainable, or at least it seems to be.
wojciem 3y ago
As a non-native English speaker, I often have troubles with clearly transforming abstract ideas from my head into a text representation adding grammar on top. ChatGPT can definitely help with that and increase supply of clever ideas that can be now wrapped into well written text.
- throwaway049 3y ago
  I imagine you can put abstract ideas into words in your primary language more easily, so I wonder if you will then get the best English language version via an LLM or from a translation of your original text. Just idly musing since there's several variables and judging the outcome is partly subjective anyway.
NikolaNovak 3y ago
I think that's inadvertently missing the point. I assume this was in broader context of all professions, not just "professional writer earning their money from just writing". Historically, a [sysadmin|developer|security professional|etc] who could "put words in a row" in a way that their manager, client, functional analyst, etc could even begin to comprehend, was worth their weight in gold. Majority of developers and sysadmins (and I speak as an insider of my own folk here:) could not communicate effectively or efficiently with people of different contexts & backgrounds; and in particular could not summarize key points that align with somebody else's priorities. Heck, in my current project, I have a team of dozen people who, yes amongst many other things, basically translate from the technical description of a problem or incident to a functional/business description of problem or incident (and yes, I've seen "Office Space":). It's just not necessarily an inherent skillset of an average techie. Nor of an average most professions. So it's not that chatgpt will replace a unique top-notch professional writer. But it can hugely augment the other 90+% of bell curve when it comes to putting words in a row.
scns 3y ago
Who really understood it, uses the fewest words. Great teachers, ELI5, etc.
pessimizer 3y ago
> This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a writer is. Writers communicate ideas. Their ideas. That's an idealization. Most writers are communicating the client's ideas, or trying to come up with ideas that they think the client would like. Most writers are trying to appeal to a particular audience for money, and new ideas mostly annoy their target market, who want a new thing pretty much like the last thing. Aside from that; the thing that differentiates writers is their skill in writing words. A hell of a lot more people have "ideas" than have writing skill. There's absolutely no reason to think writers have better ones; I'd even predict that they would have worse ones because they spent so much time studying how to write, so other people have more time for varied and exotic experiences and learning. Writers are usually writing about other people; people unlike themselves. What happens when those people can write about themselves rather than being interpreted?
akira2501 3y ago
I completely agree. This authors first several paragraphs were terribly written. No concern for grammar or sentence structure, and a love of ampersands that speaks to a middle school level of writing. Someone suggesting that their writing skills are now "obsolete" due to ChatGPT might not have had appreciable skills in the first place. The troubling part is they now see the existence of this language model as a reason to entirely abandon any effort at improving. The ideal here seems entirely backwards.

PaulHoule 3y ago

There’s the difference between being a writer and managing writers. If you are writing yourself it is at the speed of thought, if you are hiring somebody else to write you can possibly free yourself up to increase your throughput but you are going to spend time communicating expectations and reading/editing the results. If you develop a good relationship with the writer the effort to do all that can be small but if you don’t it sure can be tiring. (e.g. the New York Times has a strong and consistent style enforced in editing, people who write regularly for that paper learn to write in that style to make the editor’s job easier, people who write occasionally for that paper get their work seriously mangled by the editor)

sremani 3y ago

You are ignoring the fact that most of the writers are bullshit vendors regurgitating books, quotes, themes and things they read from somewhere else. If anything ChatGPT will basically filter out these sophists because it is a Chad-Sophist. The important thing now, is "depth" of knowledge. Of course, good generalists with wide array of mental models have their jiggle, but in the world of LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge trumps.

Swizec 3y ago
> but in the world of LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge trumps My favorite book genre is roughly “Academic writes popular book after 20 years of researching a topic”. That will be very hard to replace with ChatGPT. Someone like Gladwell though … yeah I can see LLMs being scary for that genre. Not quite yet, but soon.
- ebiester 3y ago
  Gladwell's strength is that he's an incredible storyteller. It will be a while before an LLM gets to that level.
  - Swizec 3y ago
    You are right. The stories are fantastic and he really makes the underlying research shine. I can see LLM + Human working great for that kind of writing. LLM writes the first draft, human makes it sing.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Well, Gladwell constructs great stories out of a very selective reading of research. Not that many writers don't do this to some degree, but Gladwell in his more recent career has been widely criticized for picking specific research and constructing a compelling narrative from it as opposed to telling a more nuanced tale.
chasing 3y ago
Yes, content farms will be able to produce low-value content even more cheaply. Any “writer” who leans too hard on ChatGPT will find themselves producing material that feels indistinguishable from all the other low-value crap that floods the internet.
paulcole 3y ago
> You are ignoring the fact that most of the writers are bullshit vendors regurgitating books, quotes, themes and things they read from somewhere else. I don't understand the vitriol HN has for professional writers and anyone who might work in gasp marketing. Replace "writers" with "programmers" and your statement is still true but you don't hear it being shouted from the rooftops on every post about programming on HN.

benatkin 3y ago

Maybe some of the remaining 10% was reserved for writing. But I feel like it should be more like 50% in his case so it's a fair interpretation.

symlinkk 3y ago

The vast majority of paid writers are just summarizing other people’s thoughts. Like people writing marketing blog posts are just writing what the CEO tells them to, etc.

ajmurmann 3y ago
Not to mention the content farms that just produce junk to ruin Google search results.
yamtaddle 3y ago
Right, most professional writers (and editors) are working on commercial, not-particularly-creative content of one form or another. Ad copy, docs, internal training manuals, reports, powerpoints for the execs to read (LOL), memos, that kind of shit. Corporations and governments throw off an absolute fuckton of writing per year, a fair bit of it created, or at least edited, by writing & editing professionals. All of that just got way easier to do. A lot of it can now be done by people who couldn't have, before, because a machine can fix their writing so it's sufficiently non-shit to be acceptable for many purposes. The rest, that still needs some decent writer or editor involved, is likely to see a huge increase in per-worker productivity, which will either result in similar levels of employment with far higher total output, or... in most of the people doing it now, having to switch careers. My expectation is that we'll just turn editors into writers-who-also-edit—aided throughout by AI tools—and have non-writers take on writing as part of their job (see: what happened to secretaries—we're all secretaries, now) and most of the writers are going to be out of a job. I reckon this'll hit commercial writing (where most of the writing jobs are) and high-volume-low-value fiction writing (e.g. the romance novel scene, middle-grades shared-penname book series, that kind of thing) hardest. Ghostwriters, too—one who embraces AI tools and uses them well will be able to do the work of five or more who don't, so we'll need far fewer people doing that work.

lucideer 3y ago

> but those people won’t be “writers.” Not by your definition maybe, but that misses the point made in the article: > why did I conclude that 90% of my skills had become (economically) worthless? The op has inserted a specific word here in braces because this isn't a question of what defines a writer, it's a question of who gets paid to write. By that definition, what defines a writer is not for you to decide, it's decided by the market. And the market, in my experience, is not particularly concerned with quality.

lbotos 3y ago
The market is wide and diverse. People who have money will always pay a premium for quality. With regards to writing, if you can create quality information with AI faster than before, you will be more profitable. If you are going wide, and throwing spaghetti at the wall with crappy writing, you may also be able to generate $1 from a million people vs. $10,000 from 100 people. AI threatens the middle for sure, and will force all of us to change our strategies.
- lucideer 3y ago
  You have significantly more faith in the market than I. > People who have money will always pay a premium for quality. The assumption here is that the Venn of "people who have money" and "people who can recognise / care about quality" is closer to a circle than a figure eight - that has not been my experience.
  - qikInNdOutReply 3y ago
    It also assumes that quality can not be archieved with chat gpt via quantity. Like "Make me 20 webpages with this topic", then let them test & evaluate by amazon clickwork, then regenerate with the base of the best 3 till quality goal is reached.
    - lucideer 3y ago
      Ha. Well, yeah - I guess we're even calling into question the very definition of the word quality here. Your comment seems to imply that quality is a metric that correlates with quantitative metrics of mass appeal, rather than personal & individually diverse concepts of subjective quality, which would be more what I was referring to. But both can be equally valid given the context.

ebiester 3y ago

I think there's more than that. As someone who has written millions of words in my life, I agree with you - the mechanical transformation of my ideas is not the hard part. However, there will be people who haven't developed their own style or their own fluency in the mechanical transformation, and now they have the ability to do so almost as well as I can. An expert reader will be able to tell the difference. But assume that these people have read and understand the subject but have not put the millions of words together yet. At some point, it will become like a calculator. I can multiply 20% off a dinner bill faster than getting the calculator out, but people won't spend the time learning the mental math and they will do just as good a job.

nevir 3y ago
I do think that this is going to make it a LOT more difficult for people to build up the kind of experience that folks like you have. The barrier to entry to the role just got a lot lower, but the barrier to gaining enough experience to become a specialist just dramatically jumped up
- waboremo 3y ago
  Yes exactly this, Stephen King will always be Stephen King. You can get chatgpt to generate something like Stephen King, but people know about him and his brand/style so it feels like cheap imitation. Everyone else? They won't get the ability to establish their brand/style (assuming chatgpt gets faster at updating with recent information/sources). I can see us relying far more on centralized institutions (again). Only reading from certain publishing houses, writers focusing more on trying to get into a certain house vs content of their work.
  - jdmichal 3y ago
    > I can see us relying far more on centralized institutions (again). Yes. In an age of abundant junk, curation of the gems can be a successful strategy.
    - 3y ago

riwsky 3y ago

If you don’t have an editor or aren’t rewriting your prose, you may indeed be communicating faster and clearer than most people—but not at the level the author talks about. Going back and hunting for strong, crisp verbs is not some crutch for weak writers; it’s the minimum standard of care when writing something for mass consumption.

coldtea 3y ago
>it’s the minimum standard of care when writing something for mass consumption You'd be very, very, surprised.
- riwsky 3y ago
  I'm with you, don't worry. I meant that standard normatively, not positively, and am in no danger of believing that most mass writings meet it.
ptero 3y ago
> Going back and hunting for strong, crisp verbs is not some crutch for weak writers; it’s the minimum standard of care when writing something for mass consumption. For mass consumption, sure. But the best writers almost never wrote for mass consumption. Some of them did acquire a mass following, but it usually was not a goal; their goal was to communicate the ideas they developed to a potentially interested audience. Ads and dark patterns are their enemies, they distract readers from ideas the writer wants to convey. The last few decades saw a meteoric rise of blogs and other forms of writing. A small portion created something new, but the vast majority were regurgitating old ideas in a (slightly) new light or peddling outrage. I will not cry if 90% of those writers stop writing. This will also increase chances that whoever is still writing does so because he has ideas to capture, not because he optimizes for money and is happy to push ads or ideas based on today's ROI. My 2c.
- riwsky 3y ago
  You misunderstand me: I agree that lazy SEO spammers are poor writers. My beef is with the GP's dismissal of writing slower than the speed of thought—when the best writers pore over these things more, not less. Quoting Thomas Mann, the 1929 Nobel Prize winner in Literature: "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

throw1234651234 3y ago

ChatGPT has failed me on code* I also run text through it. It is NOT good enough to convey what a good writer can. If anything, it reads like an over-zealous A student that was never too bright, just followed all the rules. That's the best case, where it doesn't completely misinterpret. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648167

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Seconding this. The code it generated even for basic stuff like an NGINX config is a complete waste of time, even when you feed it documentation for stuff like URL rewrites, it will just hallucinate things that don't exist. Worthless.

coldtea 3y ago

>This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a writer is. Writers communicate ideas. That's kind of irrelevant. People paying others for writing gigs just care about words on a page, covering a certain topic. Doesn't have to be artistic or to contain novel ideas. So, regardless if some writers make it, hundreds of thousands of people currently making a living writing copy can (and will be/are) replaced by AI text. If it gets a little better at creatively rewriting news agency feeds, many journalists will too (that's like what a huge number of journalists do, and not original reporting). At best they will be reduced, for less and more precarious pay, to glorified prompt writers and checkers. >If you’re really a writer Yes, and real true Scotsmen will be fine too. The rest, less real Scotsmen, not so much.

chrisco255 3y ago
The people that could be theoretically replaced by AI text could already have been replaced by Fiverr contractors or Mechanical Turk workers, but by and large we don't see it. If someone is able to delegate a task to a $5 worker or a 50 cent API call, and produce meaningful output, fine. But we have no such examples of tasks being able to be magically delegated in such a way that creates a cohesive, meaningful, broad whole publishing company and product together. Nobody has used Fiverr to replace the NYT editorial staff with a paper that's just as successful. And I don't think NYT would find value in delegating their article creation to ChatGPT either. Context, collaboration, high level planning, fact checking, deep understanding of market mechanics and sentiment, raw talent, etc, matter for writing news. I'm not even a fan of NYT or most modern journalism (I hate yellow journalism), but I don't think you can automate away an institution with a couple of GPT bots. I know everyone is breathlessly assuming that's the case today, but nobody is producing anything compelling. "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" as the saying goes. But for some reason GPT heads think that equation has been flipped. I don't buy it.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >The people that could be theoretically replaced by AI text could already have been replaced by Fiverr contractors or Mechanical Turk workers, but by and large we don't see it. Tons of writers and graphic designers and such are already replaced by Fiverr contractors and other similar cheapo gig workers. >Nobody has used Fiverr to replace the NYT editorial staff with a paper that's just as successful. That would be like the last holdout. A good 90% of websites don't have such quality consraints or reservations. It's like someone say "AI will replace graphic designers" and someone replying that David Carson wont have a problem. Duh, but most jobs don't go to the handful of David Carson's of the trade (or even anybody 1/100th as famous)...

Quinner 3y ago

This was illustrated by comparing his written argument, which was compelling, to the ChatGPT transcripts, which were insipid and bland, even when given the germ of an interesting point. Maybe in a year ChatGPT will be retrained on a million AI thinkpieces and it will be able to construct an essay with some interesting points. But humans need to come up with and communicate those interesting points first.

neltnerb 3y ago
I think this is an excellent point. It will write great think-pieces as soon as humans come up with thinks to be trained on.
jdmichal 3y ago
This is why I call ChatGPT a mirror. And it's a really damn good mirror. But even the best mirror can only reflect that which already exists.

mikewarot 3y ago

>If you’re really a writer, all that matters is the end result and I can guarantee you that people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a row will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day, but those people won’t be “writers.” For a historical comparison, the same could be said of photography. You have to know instinctively what makes a great photograph if you're going to have a hope of making them on a regular basis, or for pay. The gear really doesn't matter much, it's just table stakes. Having GPT spit out some new combinations of words can help you get around writers block, or expand your vocabulary, but I strongly agree it won't automatically make you a writer.

swalling 3y ago
Photography is a great example here, because it seems pretty possible that generative models do to writing what smartphones did to photography.
- haswell 3y ago
  Photographers are still doing photography for the same reasons we always were. People who want to take pictures no longer need to be photographers. I think it’s interesting to look at, but I think the parallels break down pretty quickly. The decline of legacy photographic equipment and the reduction of skill needed to take photos is all about a rather technical skillset becoming less and less necessary. The smartphone also made many other legacy things irrelevant for most people. Language and writing are closer to the core of humanity in a rather existential way. It’s less clear that reducing the skillset required to participate in writing is a net benefit, even if it enables the generation of more text by people who might not have done so before. Smartphones make a photographer’s job easier and a non-photographer’s goals possible. I worry that the same can’t be said for language models and the end result is likely to be closer to a new form of illiteracy than it is to the democratization of a process that formerly required greater degrees of technical skill. When painting broad strokes, I see the similarity. Drilling down even a little widens the conceptual gap quite a bit.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago

Freire_Herval 3y ago

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LanceH 3y ago

>people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a row will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day We already see this with book after book churned out with no real story attached. There are already way more people who write well and have little to say.

tshaddox 3y ago

It seems like your definition of “writer” is closer to my definition of “excellent writer.” But I think those are much rarer.

joe_the_user 3y ago

Also, I still maintain that I can communicate ideas significantly faster by just typing them than by using a tool like ChatGPT. But vast number of people don't get paid, for writing that communicates but rather for spewing words that vaguely cover a topic, writing that's a rewrite of already written policies in a different formats (FAQ versus Mission Statement versus etc) or marketing newsletters that want high-value adjectives put together in a plausible way. ChatGPT can apparently do all this. I wouldn't count on less people being employed versus more pap being produced but we'll see.

scotty79 3y ago

I see ChatGPT mostly as another invention in terms of bringing words to people after texting, internet, newspapers, printing press, books and writing itself. It's funny that each time people were criticizing each new such technology that it's so easy that people will produce so much garbage content that humanity will drown in it.

Waterluvian 3y ago

This misrepresentation of what writing is, is something I very commonly see in software. People often think software dev is about coding. In reality, while software developers probably enjoy the act of coding, it’s rarely the interesting or difficult part. It’s just the rendering you do to bring all the work you did to life.

psyklic 3y ago
Even with "just coding", a skilled coder can translate thoughts directly to code more precisely and faster than translating them first to imperfect English.
- aequitas 3y ago
  I still have to find a programming language that allows me to convey all the nuances of my thoughts and considerations only through code (and keep it readable and concise). This is why there there are few (no?) languages that don't allow for comments in natural language.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    The original-ish Lisp had no comments I believe. The workaround was a nop "comment macro" though. I guess it was more common in the card data days where you could write comments by hand on the card.
- zeroimpl 3y ago
  I know it sometimes feels easier to just implement something than file a JIRA ticket with enough detail to describe what needs to be done.
hangonhn 3y ago
As I've progressed in my career, I find this to be more and more true. I would say most days I spend only 50% or less of my time writing code. Even when I do write code, the volume isn't huge. The challenges for me these days is in evolving existing systems without disrupting the business and designing and then implementing things that people can build on top of. The work is still very technical but a lot of it involves researching and planning and testing out hypotheses.

deeviant 3y ago

Everybody can have ideas, even people that aren't writers. A writer is a good at the translation from idea to paper, which is what LLMs are uniquely suited to assist. I have already used LLMs to publish my first book. Specifically, I used sudowrite + chatGPT. LLMs are a true equalizer in writing. Correcting grammar, improving and rephrasing wording, and even helping to brainstorm and organize.

s_dev 3y ago

Tech rarely brings everyone up to the same level but rather empowers those with knowledge even further. Basically writers now have tool that is as powerful as Google was to researchers. So I completely agree the author is mistaken here.

Mezzie 3y ago
It's great for writers with writer's block or those of us who are better editors than writers. I can use Chat-GPT to produce something bad, but the way it's bad gives me a great place to start.
brigadier132 3y ago
Many writers are experts in something but what about the vast swathes of writers that are just writers?

hyperman1 3y ago

I don't think he claims this is being a writer. He calls it word smithing, not writing. Word smithing is a part of writing, but far from the only part. To compare, as a C programmer a spent a lot of time creating custom collections: arrays, linked lists, ... Then in the 1990's, C++ with templates came along, and had it all built in. I feared this, initally: Some technical fears,e.g. would the compiler produce something reasonable? Deeper ones were psychological: Would I still have interesting work to do? Looking back on these worries makes me look silly. Of course there was interesting programming work left after I stopped manual collection creation. In fact, it forced me to level up, made me more productive. Today, I consider a language without built-in collections as inferior. Technology did this to all of us again and again. Banks had rooms full of human computers, calculating interests on paper. They were obsoleted by mainframes calculating a whole bank's worth of interests in less than a week. Then the spreadsheet came along, where people could simulate a week of finance batch runs in minutes. I think writing is safe. We will still value people capable of communicate a book worth of ideas. Only now there is a tool capable of taking angry word salad and turning it into readable sentences. We all have to go trough an uncomfortable time leveling up, and in 5 years ChatGPT is the new normal and our worries will look silly.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

I think this might be a common misunderstanding of writing. Lots of people want to be writers and seem to focus on writing as a craft, as if once you get good enough at writing you will start having interesting ideas. To me, a writer is someone with interesting ideas who learned to write well, not someone good at writing who learned to have interesting ideas. The latter is infinitely less trainable, or at least it seems to be.

wojciem 3y ago

As a non-native English speaker, I often have troubles with clearly transforming abstract ideas from my head into a text representation adding grammar on top. ChatGPT can definitely help with that and increase supply of clever ideas that can be now wrapped into well written text.

throwaway049 3y ago
I imagine you can put abstract ideas into words in your primary language more easily, so I wonder if you will then get the best English language version via an LLM or from a translation of your original text. Just idly musing since there's several variables and judging the outcome is partly subjective anyway.

NikolaNovak 3y ago

I think that's inadvertently missing the point. I assume this was in broader context of all professions, not just "professional writer earning their money from just writing". Historically, a [sysadmin|developer|security professional|etc] who could "put words in a row" in a way that their manager, client, functional analyst, etc could even begin to comprehend, was worth their weight in gold. Majority of developers and sysadmins (and I speak as an insider of my own folk here:) could not communicate effectively or efficiently with people of different contexts & backgrounds; and in particular could not summarize key points that align with somebody else's priorities. Heck, in my current project, I have a team of dozen people who, yes amongst many other things, basically translate from the technical description of a problem or incident to a functional/business description of problem or incident (and yes, I've seen "Office Space":). It's just not necessarily an inherent skillset of an average techie. Nor of an average most professions. So it's not that chatgpt will replace a unique top-notch professional writer. But it can hugely augment the other 90+% of bell curve when it comes to putting words in a row.

scns 3y ago

Who really understood it, uses the fewest words. Great teachers, ELI5, etc.

pessimizer 3y ago

> This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a writer is. Writers communicate ideas. Their ideas. That's an idealization. Most writers are communicating the client's ideas, or trying to come up with ideas that they think the client would like. Most writers are trying to appeal to a particular audience for money, and new ideas mostly annoy their target market, who want a new thing pretty much like the last thing. Aside from that; the thing that differentiates writers is their skill in writing words. A hell of a lot more people have "ideas" than have writing skill. There's absolutely no reason to think writers have better ones; I'd even predict that they would have worse ones because they spent so much time studying how to write, so other people have more time for varied and exotic experiences and learning. Writers are usually writing about other people; people unlike themselves. What happens when those people can write about themselves rather than being interpreted?

akira2501 3y ago

I completely agree. This authors first several paragraphs were terribly written. No concern for grammar or sentence structure, and a love of ampersands that speaks to a middle school level of writing. Someone suggesting that their writing skills are now "obsolete" due to ChatGPT might not have had appreciable skills in the first place. The troubling part is they now see the existence of this language model as a reason to entirely abandon any effort at improving. The ideal here seems entirely backwards.