alt Hacker NewsAs is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended.
He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work.
I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my own field (marketing/tech writing.)
Yes, theoretically AI can replace every writer and marketer. The functionality is there.
No, this isn’t actually happening, because what’s mattered all along isn’t a generic marketing skill set; but the mental effort to actually provide value. No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring, and the writers that actually have something of value in their writing are doing just fine.
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Try being a translator today. You can provide as much value as you want, you won't get a job anymore.
Something similar happened with web search.
There used to be many site aggregators curated by people for different categories - kind of like sub-reddits. At the same time, there were purely algorithmic search engines (yahoo, google, etc.).
The algorithmic approach won, but aggregators still exist.
I think that the friction lies somewhere in between what you’re observing and what ~safety1st addresses below.
The author has a specific issue in mind. Today the author chooses joy and refuses to evoke the woe and worries of the audience thus omitting their concerns; the audience fails to inherit the author’s optimism, likely due to some kind of asymmetry in sociopolitical outlook and status between the two parties.
HN is succumbing to the discordant trends in common discourse found elsewhere online. Demographic changes may have something to do with this.
I mean it's a title. Titles are under no obligation to condense the entire content of the article into one sentence. People who want to comment on the article should read it first, and then write in good faith.
The problem lies in the HN comments which have taken that title and interpreted it through the lens of unrelated political arguments: class warfare, anti-offshoring, etc. etc. I don't think any title would be immune from these people. They're just angry because the Internet has its hooks in their brain, and they're going to post about it.
His points are good and people would be wise to read the article and take them to heart. His key points are:
1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.
2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.
None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.
HN has better moderation than a lot of places but from my vantage point the entire Internet is sinking into this garbage - we're more aware of the problem these days, at least, but everything and everywhere is more consumed by political hot takes than ever before.
If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!
The problem is that with generative AI, I have no means of protecting my work from being stolen.
It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs.
Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.
Now that wouldn't be so bad. One could argue copyright has long held back progress in certain areas. The problem is, the rules only apply one way. The rent seeking oligarchs of the tech industry can steal everything but I can't.
They can just eat the cost of a lawsuit, I can't. They can just decide to make a special deal with Disney to use their copyrighted material, I can't.
Sure the days of free markets capitalism are long gone. A few monopolists controlling the market has long been the norm. But AI makes it even worse. So much worse.
> No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring
Nah. Humans can be boring too. No one wants to consume AI art in any form because art isn't just about what it is, but also how it came to be. We care about art and history because those things involved humans. And we like understanding the takes of our fellow humans. We don't care about the take of a statistical model on the topics of art and creativity.
That still seems super naive, at least if its extended to software engineering. Companies already treat software engineers like disposable cogs to be burnt out and discarded. I don't see how AI will improve that.