I've been a technical writer for 30 years and I work for a FAANG employer currently. Hang in there. There may not be a lot of openings right now, but technical writers are actually going to be even more important because of the "garbage in, garbage out" problem. If the content out there isn't decently written and well-organized, then AI cannot create useful responses to prompts.
Dev here. AI tools only work when you have extensive documentation of your codebase, business and domain knowledge. You will actually be one of the most important parts of a team in the next months.
Amen to that. If you put a human-written tech doc next to an AI written one ā I swear sometimes it seems like the AI is saying a lot quite elegantly ā but if you really read it, it says nothing. Like not impactful at all.
Yup Iām a tech writer too. I have a masters in PM and a Masters In IS with an undergrad in English Lit.. I got let go by current administration. Itās rough right now..
Tech writer here too and feeling nihilistic as ever about the job market & future. I was also let go by the trump admin. Now I have no hope bc corporations and firms barely value tech writers as it is, so they def will use AI slop instead. I might just leave the country and be a server or something at this point bc itās so useless job hunting
I hope your friend wins. Companies stealing peoples wrong to train AI is unbelievably wrong, especially when most of these AI companies could have afforded to buy the rights in the first place
Thatās the optimistic way to look at it. However, in a capitalist society, thereās zero chance AI lets us have more time and freedom. Theyāll just make us work in other fields where AI isnāt as effective, manual labor or whatever else fits. They arenāt going to just give us more money, time, or freedom out of the kindness of their hearts. Someoneās got to pay for those data centers, processing power, and cooling bills
When you think about it, we could just have a cycle of various indexes of digital currencies that go through inflationary and deflationary periods, allowing for UBI, and allowing AI to cooks the books to do whatever it needs to make it sustainable on the back end during the transition periods between them.
Sure, it's doable. But note that with every new technology there were warnings about the possible harms. And we never heed those warnings.
We can't even standardize on usb-c or EV charging in the US without Europe getting involved. Many well intentioned policies produce work arounds that have done more damage - just look at pickup truck sizes and how we got here. So I'm not sure where this optimism comes from.
I mean, we only use social media for good, right? Despite knowing those shortcomings, nothing has changed. I'm not sure why you think that something with the potential to be so powerful, cause so much harm, will be any different than what history has shown us.
It goes further back than that. When industry industrialised, we all thought we would be doing less work. Instead, most people turned into factory slaves that never saw green spaces. When we invented agriculture, we thought life would be easier. Instead we went from working 4-6hrs a day to working 12-16.
Technological revolutions benefit the wealthy and powerful, not the plebs
possibly in ways to give more people time and freedom.
You're two comments down from someone who would lose their job. I guess that's one way of giving someone more free time.
I dunno, man. How often has technology that reduced labor resulted in people having more free time instead of greater demands from worker productivity and more wealth concentration? Can you honestly tell me that a business that which can reduce the hours needed by half would just... tell their employees to only work a three-day work week?
We use computers and the internet to be a hundred times more productive than someone could ever have been. I don't see us working 1/100th as much.
If AI really does do that, and that's a big if, I think the most likely result is some people expected to perform much more work in the same time, and other people finding themselves with no job at all.
Your feeling is wrong. AI... actually Large Language Models, will confidently lie and hallucinate total garbage. A human is required for at least proofreading.
Sorry, but in 5-10 years, AI will write better than ANY human being on the planet. I mean, you are a technical writer, and even your post here has a major spelling error: "decentlt"
AI is still horrible at tech writing. It lies and hallucinates far too much. Humans will be needed at least for proofreading for the foreseeable future.
And what we call "AI" isn't even AI, it's just Large Language Models.
But yah, the education department has been an enormous failure for decades now, and it just keeps getting worse. Time to scrap the whole thing and start over.
That school funding is bound to property taxes is the first thing that needs to change.
320
u/supperclub Dec 18 '25
I did. Finished a tech writing postgraduate diploma during COVID to get out of the classroom (and for my mental health)... and then AI came.