People who write for a living seem to often write about how AI is bad.

Reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote about not expecting someone whose job depends on not understanding a thing to understand it.

Writers can hugely benefit from AI. Not really by having the work done for them but for rephrasing etc.

I wish people could understand that creatives actually enjoy the process. Artists enjoy creating art. Writers enjoy writing. Having a computer rewrite your sentences for you reduces the art of writing to a merely mechanical process, which is not only dehumanizing but which strips the work of the author's unique signature and tone. You could train an LLM on everything Stephen King ever wrote, but the end result is only ever going to come across as a parody of what he's already written.

Yes, it's more efficient, and more productive, but not every job is like software where the only relevant measure of quality is how quickly you can get a minimum viable product to market. Some things are worth the effort and craft.

I'm not saying to take the result as-is, but you could ask the AI for suggestions. A lot of authors tend to get hung up on the same words over and over which becomes tedious as a reader.

It's really not so different from a synonym dictionary. Just a lot easier and with better context.

Also, many writers don't enjoy it as such. Sometimes it's just production. Think of journalists asked at the last moment to cut their page-long piece to 800 characters. Instead of spending 20 minutes cursing the editor and their mother and then settling into the work they can now whip it into the LLM and check it. Or marketeers having to rewrite a bunch of corporate drivel for a different target audience.

I think it's at least in part because they are completely out of the loop: "[I] realized that in the last year, I have met exactly one person who has [used generative AI] — a writer that used it for synonyms."

Future already here, not evenly distributed etc

clearly they don't know any coders

The only programmers I "know" using it for work are commenters on HN. I've seen coworkers try and tried myself but so far haven't seen a regular effective use of it except what people describe here.

I don't either put code in or use it's output directly. I treat it as a conversational oracle over stackoverflow / all documentation ever written :D