Author: Daniel Beaulieu
Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielandrewbeaulieu/
Anthropic is hiring a Standards Editor for up to $295,000 a year.
They’re looking for someone with strong opinions about commas, semicolons, and house style. One of the company's editors described the search on X more bluntly: they want a "comma queen."
There’s a bit of irony here. A company whose technology can generate a billion sentences a day is paying nearly $300,000 for one person to obsess over them.
It's not a one-off, either. Notion hired a New Yorker staff writer earlier this year.
Here's why, I think: a model can produce a clean sentence. What it can't do is tell you which sentence is worth writing, which story matters, or how to make a hundred different writers sound like one coherent voice.
That judgment is the actual job. Always has been. The clean sentences were just the visible part.
I love this and not just because I used to be a chief copy editor.
It confirms something we’ve been discussing with our partners for years – as AI makes competent writing basically free, the value of great editorial judgment goes up, not down.
If your company is still debating whether serious editorial talent is worth the money, it's worth a look at where the smartest companies in tech are putting theirs.
They’re looking for someone with strong opinions about commas, semicolons, and house style. One of the company's editors described the search on X more bluntly: they want a "comma queen."
There’s a bit of irony here. A company whose technology can generate a billion sentences a day is paying nearly $300,000 for one person to obsess over them.
It's not a one-off, either. Notion hired a New Yorker staff writer earlier this year.
Here's why, I think: a model can produce a clean sentence. What it can't do is tell you which sentence is worth writing, which story matters, or how to make a hundred different writers sound like one coherent voice.
That judgment is the actual job. Always has been. The clean sentences were just the visible part.
I love this and not just because I used to be a chief copy editor.
It confirms something we’ve been discussing with our partners for years – as AI makes competent writing basically free, the value of great editorial judgment goes up, not down.
If your company is still debating whether serious editorial talent is worth the money, it's worth a look at where the smartest companies in tech are putting theirs.