frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

The safest job from AI may be writing

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-safest-job-from-ai-may-be-writing.html
36•ilreb•54m ago

Comments

curuinor•44m ago
Workaday copywriting is dead (was moribund, now has been shot in the head). Prestige literary writing is zero-sum and therefore eternal, in the same way that equities trading (not formation and not business-building) is zero-sum and therefore the actual success of LLM has not given anyone a signal advantage anywhere there, because everyone else has LLM too.
phyzix5761•33m ago
Equity trading is not zero sum. There are real businesses and assets behind the equities they represent that have actual value and produce actual money.
curuinor•26m ago
The business-building is not zero sum, but the trading is zero-sum, and the societal purpose of the thing is to provide liquidity
porphyra•24m ago
theoretically equity trading is about distributing stonks most optimally so that productive companies get more and less productive ones get less, improving productivity of society as a whole
quickthrowman•22m ago
Derivatives (options, futures, swaps, etc) are a zero sum market, there is always a winner and a loser necessarily because the contracts have an expiration date.

The same is not true for trading equities, they are not zero sum. There are dividends, buybacks, companies will sometimes spin off a part or parts as separate companies that you get newly issued shares of stock from (GE splitting into parts is a recent example), public companies get taken private at a premium to the market price, etc.

mrweasel•16m ago
Copywriting struggles with the issue that businesses know they need it, but they don't value it. It's absolutely shocking to see how poorly companies, and governments, communicate and no amount of AI/LLM usage will change it. For decades it's been neglected and relegated to "cover my ass"- writing.

The majority of AI deployment in businesses could have been avoided, if more attention had been placed on good communication. LLMs don't yield better communication or corporate writing, just more of it, because no one in business seems to understand the value or have the ability to recognize good writing.

SteveNuts•43m ago
"Humans are going to be significantly better at writing things intended for other humans to consume" is completely at odds with "And organizations care enough about the gap, and are willing to pay for the difference".
tylerchilds•42m ago
It’s orating.

Yes write, but then orate.

Look at all of our AI feeds.

They want to be us so bad.

paxys•37m ago
Has writing ever been a safe job, even before AI?
szatkus•16m ago
If you are Steven King, sure.

From what I heard it's a bloodbath at the bottom.

gruntled-worker•10m ago
Exactly. And it's not only about whether a specific job is safe from AI, but whether it's safe from the effects of those that aren't safe: competition from laid off people and downward wage pressure. Then there's the backpressure into the educational pipeline.

Similar, much narrower crises were managed for manufacturing jobs during the worldwide industrialization era. The solution for those displaced by trade was retraining.

Unfortunately, at the moment we have no clue of what workers should be retrained to. Not writing.

mrweasel•14m ago
If you're good at it, which extremely few people are. It's my belief that not enough good writing exists for the tech companies to train an LLM. At least not a generally applicable on.
bigstrat2003•35m ago
I think it's likely to be lawyers who are the safest. Lawyers are the ones primarily in charge of the government, and I think it's likely that as soon as they feel like the legal profession is threatened, they will pass laws making it illegal to use AI for legal issues. It's not all sunshine and roses (paralegals are probably hosed), but the lawyers seem like they'll do ok.
jMyles•33m ago
> I think it's likely to be lawyers who are the safest. Lawyers are the ones primarily in charge of the government

Given what seems like an increasingly inevitable deprecation of these outdated, lumbering nation-states, it seems to me that these two assertions are mutually exclusive.

monocasa•28m ago
Eh, I think we're going to run into the same issues we're seeing in software. That is, junior and lower status positions (so SDETs in software, paralegals in law) are rapidly being downsized, and that's going to have a big issue in the future where there isn't the same talent funnel. And then in the future those that work their way up will basically be dependent on working with AI.
throw234259•10m ago
It is great time to start business as downsized paralegal. While ago there was an app that objected parking ticket fines in NYC. Anyone can find similar niche to specialise in, and just produce boring repetitive law work using LLM templates and mostly automated work.
gonzalohm•27m ago
If that was the logic then software engineers would stop using AI to "protect their jobs" but that hasn't been the case.

There will always be people that work against their own profession and colleagues for short term gains

mikelitoris•33m ago
Safest job from AI is also the oldest job.
falcor84•31m ago
That's not obvious at all, particularly given the myriad movies trying to scare us about the dangers of robots taking over that.
shagie•16m ago
Machine sex and other stories by Candas Jane Dorsey - https://archive.org/details/machinesexothers0000dors/page/76...
rglover•11m ago
If you thought all of the money being poured into data centers was excessive, wait until people can order up a proto-sentient sex bot to their front door. Oh boy.
enraged_camel•33m ago
The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at.

So the author may be correct, but for a different reason: unless writing starts being very valuable as a profession, it's unlikely the labs will spend significant resources making their AI models better at it.

jimmyl02•30m ago
What's interesting is that we still read AI's output and that's still the primary interface between a human and the AI. Implicitly that means that writing is important and I think we're already starting to see this with the complaints around how Claude "talks"
ElProlactin•18m ago
Claude "talk" is particularly annoying if you're using Claude to perform a job function (write code, analyze a spreadsheet, etc.) but average people reading an ad, Facebook post, etc. don't really care from what I can tell. In fact, I think most of them have no idea what Claude "talk" is, even if some of them notice common patterns that have emerged recently.
swatcoder•16m ago
No, they use "the same cadence and cliches" because they inflate a short and ambiguous prompt into long and specific prose by making statistical assumptions about what best fills in the gaps. It's not a training problem, it's an information theory problem, and it's not really surmountable.

Any given model will always have some distinct implicit voice that its biased towards for that infill content, and so a popular model will always become exhaustingly common, painfully familiar, and cliche. Users can use more elaborate prompts that shift the voice away from the most normative and towards some other nodes, but they need to put in special effort for that, and what people-at-scale specifically want from these tools is to put in very little effort, so we can expect that overwhelming number of casual and naive users will always be generating cliche slop with them.

Code escapes this problem not because of training but because it specifically benefits from cliche (boilerplate, patterns, etc) and so an model whose code "voice" reflects your own taste as a coder (or your toolchain's taste as a vibecoder) is going to feel like productive output rather than slop. But it's still cliche.

ThrowawayTestr•29m ago
The safest jobs are the ones that can't be done behind a screen. I'm a technician and there's no robot that could replace me and there won't be for a long time.
ElProlactin•20m ago
Except that in the worst-case AI scenarios where a huge portion of the professionals who work "behind a screen" lose their jobs, the entire labor market will have to deal with that.

There's so much focus in the US on vocations but Americans have no idea how little mechanics, plumbers, etc. in other countries make. There are a variety of reasons for this but one of the biggest is that you can't charge $200/hour to fix a leak when $200 represents a double-digit percentage of a worker's monthly salary.

ilaksh•18m ago
I think the ChatGPT moment for humanoid robotics is coming within a year or two.
metabagel•16m ago
I think you're off by at least an order of magnitude.
arcanemachiner•14m ago
So was ChatGPT back in 2021.
f311a•13m ago
Robotics cost way more to produce and support, unlike software
throw234259•25m ago
> Since LLMs lack an active mental model of a specific human reader... They cannot empathize with the human reader, as they don't have the human lived experience. And they have zero skin in the game.

LLM is perfectly capable of empathy, it just never told to do so.

Most writers today lack empathy and have no lived experience. Young californian uni graduates have strong opinions on everything, but produce repetitive boring preachy cringe stuff.

I will take well prompted LLM generated writing anytime over thst!

shahar2k•25m ago
The real thing being said here is that the author can tell good writing from bad, and assumes everyone can... I'm a visual artist and at generative art is blindingly obvious.... To me.... But not to many folks around me! Including a few artists and art adjacent folks.
dakolli•14m ago
LLM prose has degraded with each model update, the models are now being RL'd into wall of texts that only makes sense to other agents. I think its going to become more obvious as we move forward that is llm generated because labs seem to only be focused on tool-calling/agentic-coding environments, as that's the only thing that drives revenue.

There may come players who focus on models that are good at writing for technical writing/docs , copyrighting ect but I think people will lean towards not using them and will rather have the "human touch" for the things that directly impact brand perception.

Keep in mind, every single AI company that is selling the idea that you don't need to hire designers and web design is "solved" have $100k retainer designers crafting their landing pages.

a2ff6eeb0•24m ago
I don't think there's any chance people will be employed to sell the output of their brains in 20 years, outside of "athletes", or whatever we end up calling people who think for sport.

AI will outdo people in all practical uses. We're already there for debugging and coding, and we're in the middle of the largest investment in human history to expand that to everything else.

If we do a good job of alignment, AI will treat people like those cats "in charge" of train stations in Japan: our every need will be accommodated, but we won't be controlling things we don't understand.

metabagel•17m ago
There will always be creative superstars.
LarsDu88•24m ago
This feels premature. The thing about the LLMs people use today is that it's a handful of super expensively trained models serving 1000s of use cases ranging from frontier math to recipe planning.

We get to learn the foibles and language of Claude and ChatGPT as a result. The slop is almost detectable if you provide no steering prompts about story structure, narrative structure, or stylistic cues. And most writers are not finetuning the weights to their LLMs explicitly.

If you invest time into doing all that (not really trivial stuff), the results will be better.

riazrizvi•20m ago
The safest jobs are the ones that don't feed a training algorithm with data, any work that remains more of a mystery.
docheinestages•14m ago
I don't think writing is an "AI-complete" problem. It's just that the models are inefficient at it right now, due to training and/or architecture. Good writing requires thinking, reflection, and doing multiple passes. This currently translates to using a high reasoning effort and burning lots of tokens, but big AI labs like Anthropic are struggling with handling the load, so they're doing the exact opposite and finding whatever cheap trick they can to reduce token usage. One such trick is condensing ideas into as few tokens as possible, which in my opinion is one of the reasons Claude sucks so much at writing.
vips7L•10m ago
> Good writing requires thinking, reflection, and doing multiple passes

Same with code, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore.

bewareofscams•14m ago
No, that's wishful thinking.
muvlon•4m ago
There may well be some writing jobs that are safe for the reasons given in this post, but that doesn't help all the writers I know who have already lost their jobs and are struggling to find work.

It's not enough that humans can tell the difference and feel an ick, there also need to be enough organizations willing to pay money for that difference. From my vantage point, there are not. It turns out that for a ton of the writing produced by companies, the quality of the prose wasn't really "load-bearing" as Claude puts it. That writing is there to occupy a space and look professional at a glance, the same way elevator music is tolerable for the duration of an elevator ride.

greenowl•14m ago
I know of a few software engineers who have stopped using AI beyond using it selectively as a search / troubleshooting / stack overflow replacement.

If you are taking steps to protect your brain maybe in a way you are also protecting your job?

Who knows how this all turns out years from now.

ilaksh•3m ago
Unless the model watermarks text, it will become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between human legalese and AI legalese. Especially if they make it illegal, that will create a strong incentive to find-tune to imitate human lawyers more convincingly.
KineticLensman•13m ago
"The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at."

Software can be checked for being 'written well' by compilers / linters etc. There is no equivalent for well-written natural prose. Spelling and grammar checkers haven't a clue about prose semantics.

ilaksh•8m ago
They can use human writers and also LLM-based multi-step scoring systems with analytical guidelines.
ilaksh•12m ago
They just haven't got to it yet. It's not a high priority but eventually they will make a solid effort on easier style guidance and more humanization. They will probably drop the most worn ou constructs like "not X, not Y, but Z" that have become tells and target a lot of known issues in reinforcement training.

It's slightly weird how confident writers are that it won't get improved.

mjr00•6m ago
> The ChatGPT moment for humanoid robotics is coming within a year or two.

How long after that moment did the ChatGPT robots need to invent the time travel machine which let you come back to 2026 to confidently claim this?

1Password Supports the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe

https://www.alilleybrinker.com/blog/1password-funds-ethnic-cleansing/
1•Philpax•1m ago•0 comments

35 years later, Torvalds' hobby project remains developed worldwide

https://www.techradar.com/pro/its-35-years-since-linus-torvalds-first-revealed-linux-calling-it-j...
1•mushstory•6m ago•0 comments

'Superhuman' AI tool spots heart disease in less than 2 seconds

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/31/superhuman-ai-tool-spots-heart-disease
2•sandebert•6m ago•0 comments

Anthropic's LLM Watermarking

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10032
1•Curiositry•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Xyzzy – AI teamwork in one Python process, with a tamper-evident log

https://github.com/Project-Nexus-YR/XYZZY
2•Yashiru•7m ago•0 comments

Building a Billion-Vector Search System Without Putting Everything in RAM

https://pub.towardsai.net/building-a-billion-vector-search-system-without-putting-everything-in-r...
1•syumei•7m ago•0 comments

Escaping Spotify's Recommendation Basin

https://ykumar.me/blog/spot-kick/
2•ykumards•8m ago•0 comments

Trump 'Directly' Pushing Apple to Update Lake Ontario to Lake America in Maps

https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/31/trump-directly-pushing-apple-to-update-lake-ontario-name-to-lake-a...
2•pseudolus•8m ago•0 comments

Logging the trades my bot rejected was worth more than logging the ones it took

https://regimetoken.xyz/skipped-trades
1•nbk88•9m ago•0 comments

Testing Fable vs. Sol in terms of taste (they are both bad)

https://magichour.ai/blog/fable-vs-sol-taste-test
1•gmays•11m ago•0 comments

I made a game where you guess if the DMV approved/rejected license plates

https://vanitycheck.app/
2•rmjmdr•12m ago•1 comments

Using my RSS reader to find travel recommendations

https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/travel-preparation-with-my-rss-reader
1•dewey•13m ago•0 comments

Postnhost – open-source Multilingual SEO-ready Rails CMS

https://github.com/postnhost/postnhost
1•kirill_shevch•13m ago•0 comments

Grindr is one of the "best-run" consumer SaaS companies in the world

https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1w3b4za/oc_grindr_generates_more_revenue_per_employee/
1•embedding-shape•15m ago•0 comments

Your Tree – a night forest of anonymous notes

https://yourtree.net/
1•acastelldev•16m ago•0 comments

Department of War Launches OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil on GenAI.mil

https://twitter.com/DoWCTO/status/2094431308202033439
1•7777777phil•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: PiPy semantic search MCP for AI agents

https://skillfed.io/packages
1•sibmike•16m ago•0 comments

After Fraud Accusations, a Young Entrepreneur's Rise Ends in Tragedy

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/30/nyregion/mohamed-coulibaly-scam-mali-nfl.html
2•randycupertino•17m ago•1 comments

SlopTV: A livestream of AI slop generated from comments, Minimax H3 on 2x5090

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ2RexjIEFE
2•shutty•18m ago•1 comments

This Year's Record-Breaking El Niño in 3 Charts

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/climate/el-nino-temperature-charts.html
1•saikatsg•18m ago•0 comments

How Android 17 stops network snoops and SMS blasters with ECH and 2G kill switch

https://www.zdnet.com/article/android-17-web-browsing-security-privacy-features-update/
1•CrankyBear•19m ago•0 comments

Warning: Google search for 'brew install' serves phishing links in top results

https://www.google.com/search?q=brew+install&oq=brew+install&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQ...
6•7rin0•19m ago•1 comments

Memory compaction for agents has an information-theoretic floor

https://pentad.ai/PLRN/023/
1•kgcgfva•20m ago•1 comments

CSS Is Still Awesome

https://jasonsantamaria.com/blog/css-is-still-awesome
1•speckx•20m ago•0 comments

Learning how to teleport quantum states with PhysicsGraph

https://frankhecker.com/2025/08/17/learning-how-to-teleport-quantum-states-with-physicsgraph/
1•gmays•20m ago•0 comments

The Age of Average

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
1•saganus•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tray.bio – Minimalist, fast link grid built in Rust

https://tray.bio
1•annrap1d•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Appwrite 2.0

https://appwrite.io/blog/post/announcing-appwrite-2
4•eldad_fux•23m ago•0 comments

Microsoft Outlook hit by service outage

https://www.cnet.com/news-live/microsoft-outlook-exchange-online-service-outage/
2•dude250711•24m ago•1 comments

The pothole crisis is finally over

https://replyresearch.com/the-pothole-crisis-is-finally-over/
2•replyresearch•24m ago•0 comments