[jcgrillo]

yeah this is some insanely out of touch nonsense.. I have no idea who she is but the idea that any of the current crop of models could replace a copy editor is laughable. Just ask it how many times the letter b appears in blueberry.

[bluGill]

The models can replace humans. They can't do it well, but it might be good enough. If you are tiny and just barely making money at all in your job you should evaluate if this cost cutting is good enough or not.

i'm getting the idea though the whoever she is - she is making good amount of money: she should demand a higher bar that I don't think llm's can meet today just because she can afford it and the risk that it matters is too high.

[verzali]

She runs one of the biggest newsletters on Substack. Probably earning a millon dollars a month from it. But that's pretty far off a billion. AI editors also aren't great - they help if you can't afford anything else, but as soon as you make enough to hire a real person you probably should do that.

[jcgrillo]

I'm not much of a writer myself, but what little I do know about writing suggests that a "not very good" editor is actually much worse than none at all. That is, arguing with an LLM about my writing is probably going to make my writing worse, not better.

[queenkjuul]

Yeah an LLM editor seems like the fastest way she could stop making money on substack

[qcnguy]

LLMs are good at copy editing. They recognize when words are misspelled or grammar is poor very easily, despite not being able to see individual letters.

For understanding the guy's point it helps if you know anything about Heather Cox Richardson. Merely saying her copyeditors could be replaced by AI is a gross minimization, probably most of her own work could be too.

HCRs newsletter is popular because she delivers much purer, harder Trump Derangement Syndrome than anyone else on the market. That's it, that's the entire secret to her success. She delivers an ordinary and easily LLMable service (summarizing news), but ramps the Trump hate up orders of magnitude. Her competitive edge is she delivers to a market of liberals who find themselves disgusted with the mainstream journalism because, as they see it, it tries much too hard to be neutral and unbiased. It's sort of like how the Guardian makes millions off of donations by being a very openly left wing paper, except 1000x more extreme.

One might think US journalism is not particularly neutral, but they claim they are, so if you reject the whole notion that journalism should be unbiased as idiotic appeasement the market doesn't have much for you. Into this gap steps Heather Cox Richardson, a humanities academic who for a low low price will send you a daily news report that, every day, tells you how evil and bad Trump is and how good a person you are for realizing that.

Go read some of her reports and then tell us an LLM couldn't write them cold, I dare you. It probably wouldn't even need to be a big LLM. Summarization and rewrites are things they're really good at. She never even cites sources and hallucinations aren't the sort of thing her customer base are going to notice.

[jcgrillo]

You should do it! I bet you could pitch a seed round for that business, might be your big break

[queenkjuul]

An LLM could not write them.