Re:It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT
by chuddington on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @02:14AM
(#35521448)
I've personally worked on 3 tickets in the last week related to customers not having a proper understanding of how a feature works due to unclear wording in the official docs. The first one took a lot of time to investigate and find out if it was actually behaving the way it should. Good technical writers are very valuable, with ChatGPT tech writers there will be many more situations like mine!
Re:It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT
by pythonaut_16 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:09AM
(#35526245)
Were the unhelpful docs written by ChatGPT? Otherwise your story doesn't support your conclusion.
It's more likely LLMs will result in better docs for some projects and worse docs for others.
Re:It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT
by layer8 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @07:06AM
(#35523402)
It really all depends on what an employer values or doesn’t value.
Re:It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT
by ericd on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:39AM
(#35524955)
You can always point to Stripe. I’m pretty sure their high quality docs were a huge part of what launched the company. It’s such an important part of the UX.
Re:It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT
by Workaccount2 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:58AM
(#35526087)
There will not be technical writers or technical documentation. It will just be whatever the engineers output.
Companies will train an LLM on their product and users will simply interface with that AI. Or there will be a common AI (like chatGPT) that companies offer up all their gross engineering speak documentation to train on.
Re:It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT
by acuozzo on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @06:57PM
(#35532824)
> A big part of my role is speaking to people to understand what users need to learn, then designing an organization for documentation around that.
If two consultants named Bob show up in your office place, run.
I don't worry (yet) that LLMs can produce better docs than I can. A big part of my role is speaking to people to understand what users need to learn, then designing an organization for documentation around that. Writing is of course a big part, but understanding what to write and what not to write is often even more important.
Instead, I worry about a situation like the one in this post, where some exec thinks that AI can get you XX% of the way there for much less money. I think they would be mistaken, but what hurts my case is that it's inherently extremely difficult to demonstrate the value of technical writers quantitatively.