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Comment by thtmnisamnstr

2 days ago

I'm a marketer. I write a lot. GPT-4.5 is really good at natural sounding writing. It's nearing the point where it would be worth $200/mth for me to have access to it all the time.

I used the GPT-4.5 API to write a novel, with a reasonably simple loop-based workflow. The novel was good enough that my son read the whole thing. And he has no issue quitting a book part way through if it becomes boring.

If everyone is as good as you , how much will your work cost?

  • A better question might be: "If everyone is as good as you, how much will you be worth in the marketplace?"

    • Well, an even better question might be: if everyone is the same, what does it take to be exceptional?

      I'm firmly convinced that being able to troubleshoot code, even code generated by LLMs, and to write guidelines and tests to make sure it's functioning, is a skill of a shrinking pool

      For smaller stuff, great. Everyone's the same. The second your application starts gaining responsibility and complexity, you're going to need to be able to demonstrate reproducibility and reliability of your application to stakeholders.

      Like, your job increasingly will be creating interface checkpoints in the code, and then having the model generate each step of the pipeline. That's great, but you have understand and validate what it wrote, AND have a rich set of very comprehensive tests to be able to iterate quickly.

      And as mentioned, on top of that, large swaths of the field of new people have their brains completely rotted by these tools. (certainly not all new/young people, but i've seen some real rough shit)

      If anything, I see a weird gap opening up

      - people who dont adopt these tools start falling out of the industry - they're too slow

      - people who adopt these tools too early stop getting hired - they're too risky

      - people who have experience in industry/troubleshooting/etc, who adopt these tools, become modern day cobol programmers - they're charging $700 an hour

      the real question to me is this: does the amount of people taken out of the pool by being slow or risky due to these tools, outpace the reduction in jobs caused by these tools?

  • It probably would be just like with developers.

    A great developer + an AI = productive.

    A shitty developer + an AI = still shit.

    AI does not make all developers the same. And it doesn't make all marketers the same.

I wish all LLM-written marketing copy had disclaimers so I knew never to waste my time reading it.