Has writing ever been a safe job, even before AI?

If you are Steven King, sure.

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

	▲	gruntled-worker a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	brendoelfrendo a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's a pretty reliable career for hundreds if not thousands of mid-list authors who generally stick to genre fiction. It's entirely possible that AI could core out the middle of the pack as well as the bottom, which would threaten not just jobs but a wealth of institutional knowledge that those authors share among their peers and especially new up-and-comers.

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mrweasel a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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TFNA a day ago | parent [-]

Tech companies are training off the shadow libraries, which have the bulk of English-language human writing in book form from the twentieth century, and that traditionally published stuff with an ISBN usually got a proper editor of some kind. So, it is hard to believe LLM companies don't have enough material; it's not as if they are limited to low-quality stuff on the web.

	▲	ahartmetz 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It might come down to that they don't care (enough). They could probably do it if they had to (hire a lot of professional editors and authors to train models), but AGI seems more profitable and also a better "story" for investors than models that are good at writing. Thing is, LLMs don't seem to be the right vehicle for AGI, but even if the nerds understand that, see above about profit perspectives and investors. These companies are under insane pressure to deliver the next super hit or be seen trying.