[jaynetics]

As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Translators and proofreaders already had to prioritize mass over flawless output, back when Google Translate was hilariously bad and spell checkers very limited. Nowadays, even the translation of legal texts in the EU parliament is done by a fraction of the former workforce. Very few of the writers and none of the proofreaders I knew are still in the industry.

Addressing the wider point, yes, there is still a market for great artists and creators, but it's nowhere near large enough to accommodate the many, many people who used to make a modest living, doing these small, okay-ish things, occasionally injecting a bit of love into them, as much as they could under time constraints.

[anon191928]

What I understand is AI leads certain markets to be smaller in terms of economics. Wayy smaller actually. Only few industry will keep growing because of this.

[cj]

Specifically markets where “good enough” quality is acceptable.

Translation is an good example. Still need humans for perfect quality, but most use cases arguably don’t require perfect.

And for the remaining translators their job has now morphed into quality control.

[nostrademons]

I think this is a key point, and one that we've seen in a number of other markets (eg. computer programming, art, question-answering, UX design, trip planning, resume writing, job postings, etc.). AI eats the low end, the portion that is one step above bullshit, but it turns out that in a lot of industries the customer just wants the job done and doesn't care or can't tell how well it is done. It's related to Terence Tao's point about AI being more useful as a "red team" member [1].

This has a bunch of implications that are positive and also a bunch that are troubling. On one hand, it's likely going to create a burst of economic activity as the cost of these marginal activities goes way down. Many things that aren't feasible now because you can't afford to pay a copywriter or an artist or a programmer are suddenly going to become feasible because you can pay ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini at a fraction of the cost. It's a huge boon for startups and small businesses: instead of needing to raise capital and hire a team to build your MVP, just build it yourself with the help of AI. It's also a boon for DIYers and people who want to customize their life: already I've used Claude Code to build out a custom computer program for a couple household organization tasks that I would otherwise need to get an off-the-shelf program that doesn't really do what I want for, because the time cost of programming was previously too high.

But this sort of low-value junior work has historically been what people use to develop skills and break into the industry. And juniors become seniors, and typically you need senior-level skills to be able to know what to ask the AI and prompt it on the specifics of how to do a task best. Are we creating a world that's just thoroughly mediocre, filled only with the content that a junior-level AI can generate? What happens to economic activity when people realize they're getting shitty AI-generated slop for their money and the entrepreneur who sold it to them is pocketing most of the profits? At least with shitty human-generated bullshit, there's a way to call the professional on it (or at least the parts that you recognize as objectionable) and have them do it again to a higher standard. If the business is structured on AI and nobody knows how to prompt it to do better, you're just stuck, and the shitty bullshit world is the one you live in.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711306