alt Hacker NewsAt least for writing, I think AI is mostly useful for the types of writing that aren’t particularly interesting or worthwhile in having to begin with.
In concrete terms, AI isn’t all that useful for writing a personal blog, because no one wants to read obvious AI slop. But it is useful for creating boilerplate product pages, FAQs, and other types of writing that weren’t very interesting pre-AI.
So it’s not really a huge deal to me that my skill for writing descriptive product page text or FAQs is atrophying, assuming that it is.
Not worthwhile feels a bit strong (a good FAQ is definitely worthwhile!), but I definitely agree that there is a big difference between any kind of art (writing, playing music, creation of images/videos/etc.) for its own sake and for commercial purposes. AI is terrible for the former but perfectly fine for the latter.
There will always be value in a human writing fiction or a memoir or even a Substack. The human perspective is inherently valuable there. Much less so with ad copy that's just going to get A/B tested ad infinitum until a winner is picked out based entirely on data.
Same with visual art. Art painters aren't going to lose their jobs to AI, but once you've got a robot that can paint a house reliably, house painters are done for.