Over the past 30 years I have worked many jobs in which writing was a central element, from tutoring at a community college writing center, to technical editing

Over the past 30 years I have worked many jobs in which writing was a central element, from tutoring at a community college writing center, to technical editing, translation, ghostwriting, science communications, and policy research. I haven't even used GPT4 yet, but just from playing with GPT3 it was very clear that the writing (sorry!) is on the wall. Yes, the prose can be stilted nd sometimes it just makes stuff up. But human writers, even good ones, are fallible, while also being slow and expensive to boot. Even before AI, the internet experience had begun to undermine the traditional value assigned to good writing; it turned out that there are plenty of good writers who would publish their work for free. LLMs are already producing better content than most undergrads in their own fields, and can apparently do the same in every field, in multiple languages, as well as write passable code, make recipes, dungeonmaster RPG campaigns, spew out marketing bumpf, write surprisingly good creative mashups ("John Donne smoking salvia and rhapsodizing while clipping his toenails," or whatever), etc., etc. Even if the technology doesn't improve significantly, I think this is going to have a radical impact on how writing ability is perceived - from a useful, even admirable, marketable skill to a novelty hobby, like chess. No doubt some very good writing will continue to be produced, and I'm sure LLMs will enable new forms of creativity in the hands of capable users. But the market for writing has always involved lots of jobs that only demand content that is just good enough, and if we're being honest, just crap really. Now anyone can have that for a $20/month subscription, plus maybe some light editorial touchup. The most talented and most specialized writers will still find work, but I guess their market value will be undermined by the combined effects of 1) the re-valuation of average-or-worse writing to zero, and 2) increased competition for paying jobs by a growing pool of under-employed/precarious, lean and hungry scribes.