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Comment by throwaway33381 | Hacker News Reader

No, using AI to write is basically having it do everything for you. It's not a tool it's a replacement. In the years to come several hundreds of thousands of jobs will begin to disappear from copywriters to fiction and non fiction writers. Replaced by roles such as marketers to historians. It's not photoshop for photographers is just going to push the vast majority of people wanting to pursue these fields out of the market.

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I think nearly everything you said is likely wrong.

AI doesn’t “do everything for you” any more than word processors, music sequencers, or CAD does. AI allows people to operate at higher levels of abstraction, is all. Yes, fewer people will type repetitive copy in to word processors. But that’s fine.

You are mistaking activity for productivity. Few people go into writing because they enjoy typing. AI offers leverage, which is the most amazing thing for anyone interested in producing work.

Ask any professional writer: revisions are a chore. Authors often say a novel is 10% writing, 90% rewriting, and they don’t enjoy the rewriting part.

So, IMO, contrary to your doomer take, I think we will see more people producing better work because they can focus on the parts they love and not do the grind that was only ever a necessary evil.

(The exception being those who love the grind and not the product)

I work as a professional writer. Editing is a part of the process but for a large portion of work, editing does not exist outside the publishing sphere. Publishers will be unable to handle the sheer load of submissions given to them by "writers". More established ones such as penguin house have already determined that with increased competition they will likely see sales drop predictions for smaller workshops that have existed are believed to fold due to the scale of operations in the years to come. These problems already existed before AI or Chat GPT but due to the scale will make them much worse.

The end has come.

I dunno, I have a friend who has effectively automated her entire job at this point through ChatGPT, and her role would almost certainly disappear if her bosses were aware.

Netflix also infamously used AI to generate background images for an anime, which is work that previously would have put food on the table for illustrators.[0]

It's hard to look all of this and think that all the jobs are going to stick around. I know at least 5 copywriters who have made their entire living as adults writing banal junk for small companies. All 5 of those careers will vanish in the coming years.

[0] https://www.cined.com/netflix-uses-ai-to-generate-anime-shor...

>Netflix also infamously used AI to generate background images for an anime, which is work that previously would have put food on the table for illustrators.[0]

Sooner or later studios will use it to leverage the work of their artist. If the same quality of animation requires half the staff to make it, some will use it as a cost reduction, others will use it to make better and more complex art. Maybe we'll finally get 60fps Anime instead of the 10 - 24 that is typical now. Your favorite series that was cancelled after a single because they didn't have budget, now they can make 5 season of it with the same budget.

Using it to write vs. using it to help you are two very different things.

For example: sometimes I will pass a paragraph through an LLM and ask it to return it in a more "active voice". Then I _manually_ edit my original paragraph, if I wish, to make it seem more suitable for my current goals.

This is sort of like Photoshop for photographers.

On the other note, online submissions for publishers will be retroactively filled with spam due to the ease and ability to publish and submit content. It already happened with Clarke's World. The end is coming not a revolution. Just the end.

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