Unpopular opinion: That viral study about AI replacing writers is missing the real story

I was reading through a paper from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab last week and found out that AI actually reduces hiring for writers by less than 5% in most cases. Everyone keeps talking about massive job loss but the data I saw shows most companies using AI still need humans to fix the outputs. Why is the doom narrative getting all the attention when the numbers tell a different story?

2 comments

2 Comments

barbara_jenkins667d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, you hit the nail on the head with "most companies using AI still need humans to fix the outputs." I've seen that up close with some of my clients who run marketing firms. They tried letting AI write everything for a few months and ended up spending twice as long cleaning up the errors and weird phrasing. The real story is AI is just another tool, not a replacement. That doom narrative gets clicks, but the day to day reality is a lot more boring.

kimw577d ago

Yeah I've been watching that too @barbara_jenkins66. The part that gets me is when people say "AI writes better than humans" but then you look at the output and it's full of weird facts or just flat out wrong. Like one client of a friend had AI generate a whole blog post about a tech product and it kept saying the battery lasted 3 days when the actual spec is 8 hours. How is that better? But my real question is - if the doom narrative is mostly hype, why do you think news sites and social media keep pushing it so hard instead of talking about the actual boring reality?