If someone is able to delegate a task to a $5 worker or a 50 cent API call, and produce meaningful output, fine. But we have no such examples of tasks being able to be magically delegated in such a way that creates a cohesive, meaningful, broad whole publishing company and product together.
Nobody has used Fiverr to replace the NYT editorial staff with a paper that's just as successful. And I don't think NYT would find value in delegating their article creation to ChatGPT either.
Context, collaboration, high level planning, fact checking, deep understanding of market mechanics and sentiment, raw talent, etc, matter for writing news. I'm not even a fan of NYT or most modern journalism (I hate yellow journalism), but I don't think you can automate away an institution with a couple of GPT bots. I know everyone is breathlessly assuming that's the case today, but nobody is producing anything compelling.
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" as the saying goes. But for some reason GPT heads think that equation has been flipped. I don't buy it.
Tons of writers and graphic designers and such are already replaced by Fiverr contractors and other similar cheapo gig workers.
>Nobody has used Fiverr to replace the NYT editorial staff with a paper that's just as successful.
That would be like the last holdout. A good 90% of websites don't have such quality consraints or reservations.
It's like someone say "AI will replace graphic designers" and someone replying that David Carson wont have a problem. Duh, but most jobs don't go to the handful of David Carson's of the trade (or even anybody 1/100th as famous)...
Really? NYT is employing this? What organization is doing this (outsourcing their core competency) and succeeding bigly?
> That would be like the last holdout. A good 90% of websites don't have such quality consraints or reservations.
A good 99.99% of websites don't even matter, are just private personal sites with no product or business attached to them, so I'm not even sure what the assertion is there. Of course there's a power law for quality, impact, profitability, etc among websites just as there is for anything. If someone uses GPT on their personal blog site, that 3 people a year actually read, I'm not sure that's proving anything.
> It's like someone say "AI will replace graphic designers" and someone replying that David Carson wont have a problem. Duh, but most jobs don't go to the handful of David Carson's of the trade (or even anybody 1/100th as famous)...
I don't think AI, even at present capabilities, is capable of replacing graphic designers at any business where graphic design is the core competency. A skilled graphic designer is just going to have their productivity enhanced by having access to AI, and they're going to still be able to perform at far higher and consistent quality than "a prompt engineer". Consequently, however, demand for custom imagery will increase as people realize they can do more than simply add a stock image to an ad campaign.
But just as "stock photo libraries" didn't kill the photography profession, nor did even putting a HD camera in everyone's pocket with amazing filter and stabilization effects...I predict that AI graphic tools will not replace graphic designers.
What's with NYT again? I already wrote NYT will be the last holdout, i.e. NOT using this, but that means nothing, because 99% of news and content websites are not the NYT or have the same constraints and reputation to uphold.
>A good 99.99% of websites don't even matter, are just private personal sites with no product or business attached to them, so I'm not even sure what the assertion is there.
I'm not talking about personal websites. This is in the context of news and content websites, not personal homepages. We were talking about websites currently employing journalists and writers, and the danger AI would be to their jobs, remember?
>I don't think AI, even at present capabilities, is capable of replacing graphic designers at any business where graphic design is the core competency.
Which is irrelevant. It can still replace them where graphic design is not the core competency, but still provides a livelihood for hundreds of thousands of people - small time web designers, logo makers, etc. working for small businesses, individuals, and so on.
Dismissingt this as "where graphic design is the core competency", is more or less again like saying "David Carson and big design brands will do fine".
>But just as "stock photo libraries" didn't kill the photography profession, nor did even putting a HD camera in everyone's pocket with amazing filter and stabilization effects...
You'd be very surprised. Photography as a profession is near ly dead. The vast majority of professional news photographers, whole teams, have been fired from all major and minor newspapers that used to have them, and the profession in general has depreciated greatly.
If you mean "there are people who still do it as a profession", sure, it wasn't killed. People still offer horse carriage rides too, at least photography fares considerably better than that.
Ok, show me one meaningful publication doing this, that's what I'm getting at. I used NYT as my original example to illustrate you can't just fire a news room and replace it with a GPT bot. What business can you do this with, where writing is the core competency?
How about graphic design? Is there an example of a graphic design firm that has fired its designers and replaced them with Stable Diffusion et al and a single PM to achieve the same output? Or even reduced their head count because these AI tools have so dramatically improved productivity that one designer can now do the work of 2 or 3 or 10?
> It can still replace them where graphic design is not the core competency (small time web designers, logo makers, etc. working for small businesses, individuals, and so on.)
Let's work with a concrete example here. I'm going to work under the assumption that there is a self-employed web designer out there who, despite the existence of hundreds of template web app creators (such as Wordpress, Webflow, Wix, etc), no-code tools like IFTTT and Fiverr contractors on demand, has managed to carve out a full-time job for themselves designing websites.
In order to carve out that niche in the presence of already existing WYSIWYG tools and outsourcing services, they are already doing something different than just boiler plate web design. Before bots come for this web designer's business, these bots would first have to make these tools completely obsolete. And yet, I know of no one today suggesting that an ordinary small business bypass Webflow for ChatGPT + Stable Diffusion to create their web site.
If ChatGPT + Stable Diffusion is really the dangerous job-killing combination that everyone thinks it is, it first has to replace the boiler plate tooling and the Fiverr contractors. Then AI's capabilities need to expand to accommodate long-term client relationships, long term contextual awareness of client needs, realtime integration of marketplace demands, institutional expertise and deep product knowledge and awareness about many implicit things not explicitly documented for any GPT to consume (and not necessarily possible to document, either). It would need to have wisdom to understand when it shouldn't, in the context of often incredibly vague product requirements. It would need to be able to sometimes even forcefully push back against client demands and recommend an alternative path altogether.
These are the qualities of a good web designer (and indeed, any creative worker), and they're just a small sampling of the reason why the already existing boiler plate services haven't replaced the need for good people.
We have data on this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides it: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Media-and-Communication/Photographer...
Number of jobs, 2021: 125,600 Job outlook 2021-2031: 9% growth (faster than average)
> The vast majority of professional news photographers, whole teams, have been fired from all major and minor newspapers that used to have them
That's because no one reads newspapers any more, not because of automation. The internet + social media killed the newspaper, but it didn't decrease overall demand for professional photography.
First, those are much depreciated jobs. It's as if programmers became minimum wage "AI prompt checkers" and instead of 1 million programmers we got 2 million of them (some covering what Excel jockies do now). There are more of them, but hardly what it was before.
Second, the growth must be compared with overall industry growth.
"Both the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014) and IBIS World (2013) report that the photography industry is in decline. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014) expects to see the number employed in the photography industry increase by 4% between 2012 and 2022, this is well below the average of 11% increase across all industries. IBIS World (2013) reports a decline in the UK between 2009 and 2014 of 4.1% but also comments that this is a long term decline. Clifford (2013) and Photo Counter (2012) both support the view that the photography industry has been declining for some time. Clifford (2013) suggests that photographers have no clearly defined career paths anymore and that more photographers entering the market find themselves doing a wide variety of photography assignments to make a living. The two metrics used to measure the growth and decline of an industry are generally the changes in revenue and the changes in the number of people employed in that industry. Yang (2010) explains that the distinction between amateur photographers and professional photographers is blurring and to an extent becomes irrelevant since many amateur photographers / hobbyist photographers are selling their work on micro stock photography websites. Amateur photographers selling their images on micro stock websites are not likely to be included in the metrics used for measuring the growth / decline of the photography industry".
https://pure.solent.ac.uk/ws/files/24372581/Are_professional...
That's kind of irrelevant. People paying others for writing gigs just care about words on a page, covering a certain topic. Doesn't have to be artistic or to contain novel ideas.
So, regardless if some writers make it, hundreds of thousands of people currently making a living writing copy can (and will be/are) replaced by AI text. If it gets a little better at creatively rewriting news agency feeds, many journalists will too (that's like what a huge number of journalists do, and not original reporting).
At best they will be reduced, for less and more precarious pay, to glorified prompt writers and checkers.
>If you’re really a writer
Yes, and real true Scotsmen will be fine too. The rest, less real Scotsmen, not so much.