3 ms·

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 the

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.

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.