David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: Ok, so you’ve spent your career television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had that tool to solve those thorny problems…
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: … Or saying…
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: … Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don’t think AI can challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.
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I never get the “generate ideas with AI” advice. AI can be useful for directing you to sources for researching an idea or poking holes in your ideas, but the ideas AI comes up themselves are so braindead and bland. If you’re stuck in such a fundamental way you need to go back and rewrite sections and rethink what you’re trying to do.
Based Simon
NPRs corporate capture is a national disgrace. The reporters are fucking hand puppets now a days.
Cut their funding massively and that’s what you get I guess. PBS also got massive cuts under Trump, information is the enemy of the state.
Writing is so much easier when you skip over the bit where you do writing.
most fun part of writing is the part where you don’t write
Yes but if you don’t care if it’s good.
Fresh version with more pixels
If you don’t like dark mode, you can take another one here: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/1177194215/tv-writer-david-simon-weighs-in-on-the-writers-guild-of-america-strike
Thank you! OP should be shot
I’ve had this exact conversation in real life.
I do IT work. Someone who was a heavy AI user asked me ‘how was I integrating AI into my workflow’ as if it was a foregone conclusion that I AM integrating AI. I told him I wasn’t, that AI may be useful for finding answers to some things or photoshopping funny pictures but most of what I do is intellectual, specific to certain situations and requirements, which AI generally doesn’t understand. That I can’t risk AI making actual changes to my environments, so if I let AI write a plan and then I proof it myself and then do it, it’s easier just to do the work myself. So that leaves the only thing AI could do for me is writing, and I’m good at writing, so I overall have little or no use for AI.
Dude looked at me like I was an alien. Like he legitimately could not understand why an intelligent person would voluntarily reject AI. Like I said I rejected cars and I ride a horse to work. Does not compute. Here’s this supposedly smart person who knows more about tech than the next 2-3 people in the office combined, and this person is completely rejecting the holy grail.
I think everyone should think of AI as that you have random access to the knowledge of reddit. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s a troll, and sometimes no one will answer. You also have to have knowledge to understand what it’s saying most of the time.
But, you have to specify it isn’t actually redditors seeing the question and posting an answer. AI doesn’t actually understand questions.
It’s more that it sees your question and generates text near that question that wouldn’t look out of place on Reddit. Sometimes what it generates is good, sometimes it’s what a troll would say, the key thing is that it’s believable but not accurate.
the key thing is that it’s believable but not accurate.
Right, I think we’re agreeing. That is exactly like reddit.
at least reddit doesn’t (well, didn’t) consume a nonillion jiggawatts just to produce a half-shitty answer
Devils advocate only:
But you’d have to include the electric consumption of all reddit commenters and posters as well since they are creating the content.
It’s tough not to form a superiority complex these days when you hear of people who can’t compose emails by themselves.
Yeah, and I think it’s a symptom of a cultural problem where people think prosperity means essentially not having to do anything. The ideal is to sit on your ass and consume, while never having to create.
But when you don’t do anything for yourself and have AI or hired help do it so that you can go back to scrolling the dopamine treadmill, you eventually don’t know how to do it even if you wanted to. Losing knowledge, skills, and attention span means getting more stupid, kinda by definition.
This negative feedback loop is a form of conditioning, and it is not in our best interests. It is in the interests of advertisers, psychological manipulators, tech barons, and others who are generally the worst.
In my case, the more I have consciously decided to take care of my own shit – in various aspects of life – the better I have felt. It’s not the one secret to a fulfilling life, but it’s an important one. And yes damn it, I sometimes use dashes.
My boss had three of us on a Teams call for nearly an hour and a half yesterday because he needed our help to make one Power Point slide.
To be fair, power point - if you don’t regularly use it and especially if you’re using a ‘template’ someone made - is a miserable experience.
Add four words to a sentence - why did the fucking font size change and why did an unrelated text box shrink?!?!? I just need to add ‘this has been approved’ to my status deck.
Why can’t I update a blob of text? Oh, it’s in the Slide Master, which has exactly one instance of this slide type in the deck.
/rant. I haven’t lowered myself to using copilot to make these changes, though.
Meanwhile I just plugged Claude into a production cluster to perform analysis and I accepted its suggestions for an immediate fix, while it also made those changes to my Ansible setup and committed them to git.
I think AI is great for some things, but imo it should NOT be wasted generating funny pictures or videos.
I think you’re one un-caught hallucination away from having claude eat the production database. I get that you think you’re approving suggestions, but there are many examples already of “<llm> ignored my directive of don’t make changes and then said sorry” out there.
If a prompt can make changes, then at some point a prompt will make bad changes. It hasn’t happened to you yet, apparently, but you’re playing Russian Roulette with the business.
I do agree it has some use cases, but shouldn’t be used to make pictures, video or writing text a human claims as something they produced.
We’ll see, I like to live life dangerously, especially when my org is pushing AI down our throats
That is absolutely a sentiment I can get behind. I just am afraid it’ll backfire and I’ve been lucky enough to not have to have that battle yet.
“You demanded I put AI here. This is *your* fault.”
Yes sir. Honestly I’m amazed by the work Gemini and Claude does for me, and according to my best judgment, I should never allow access to my local SSH client, but the bastards asked for this.
Same. Planning-with-files has saved my ass more times than I can count.
You’d think that last sentence would make people understand HOW you got that knowledge…
Sometimes I can just feel the neolib oozing from an NPR host and their faith in capitalism to fix all things.
For me it really started when Freakenomics lobbed those softball questions to one of the Koch brothers, and then I had a moment of “…what the fuck are you doing? …have you always been like this? …and I’m just now noticing? …oh god …oh god! your previous episodes are so terrible too! how did I not see this?! it’s all bathwater! no baby! oh fuck!”
I can’t quite put my finger on moments like yours, but had the same strange sensation of creeping revulsion toward NPR, where it once felt like a safe, familiar, even comforting, thing.
NPR, in a million ways small and large, carries water for the status quo, and it’s fuckin gross. Even just small ongoing things like their current phrasing “the war in Iran”. It’s an anodyne, neutral phrasing used in their broadcasts, seemingly as a rule. Same neutral language for cops when “an assailant was shot and died”, or when “a weapon discharged”, etc.
It’s never the war against Iran, it’s not “the unprovoked attack against Iran”, etc., it’s just this vague inscrutable thing merely happening, and merely in Iran. No one is responsible, and it just is there. And thankfully, it’s only IN Iran! Wouldn’t it be worse if that were spilling over into other places and things?
There are countless stronger examples, but this one is current and consistent and you can hear it in any random news broadcast, and it tells a huge lie in a tiny word every time.
Freakonomics was a big breaking point for me too. I used to think it was really cool, and even read the first book! But there was an argument in it that stuck with me, and was sort of the marquee analysis for the show for a long time.
It went something like, in the 90s there was all this fuss about super-predators, urban youths who would grow up without stable families and surrounded by gang violence, and they would basically never develop a conscience, and you’d have a generation of killers that made the cities unliveable. Apparently this was something Killary stumped about but I remember it being all over the news at one point. So why did this never occur? Because this generation would be the first who grew up with favorable laws and views toward abortion, so women were able to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
And at first I was pretty amazed at this, I was like, wow aren’t liberal reforms great? But after reading and learning and thinking more about the world I realized what I wish was obvious: there never was a threat of “super predators,” these people are just incredibly racist, and the freakonomocs team were fucking hacks.
Then one day I was picking my kids up and listening to Elliot Abrams on freah air or some shit speaking in dulcet tunes about the necessity to invade Venezuela. Another segment on Wait wait don’t tell me was about a precision missle that could precisely target a particular person, and they made a joke about how the missle could fly so close to the target that samurai swords would pop out and slice up the terrorist. Queue hysterical laughter.
And that was it, I realized these people are the most bloodthirsty fucking freaks imaginable. People who sounded smart to sell massacres and racism to dumb idiots, like myself at one point, to middle brow pseudo intellectuals who didn’t really pay attention, just wanted to feel good about being informed while learning nothing.
Once you see how NPR is just dripping in gore, you can’t unsee it
You’re falsely linking two different things, Freakonomics never connected the superpredator myth to abortion, just crime.
It’s also disingenuous to imply that Stephen Dubner (a libertarian) could speak for the views of every single NPR affiliate. It doesn’t work that way.
Tangentially, the Freakonomics guys definitely didn’t understand sumo well enough to give a full explanation of their data on that topic, however.
Oh yeah, to be clear I don’t think Freakonomics is worth listening to, but trying to draw a link between the views of a single host and community funded media at large is not honest.
I wish my break with them was that lucid, I just vaguely felt uneasy and decided to unsubscribe several years ago. Disquieting to know my gut was spot-on well before I pieced it together
My break was just hating their editing style. Wasn’t until years later when I learned they were conservative.
Radiolab has some good stories, but the editing is so grating. I wish there was something with energy between them and Science Friday or podcasts where it’s just two people talking back and forth. I appreciate Radiolab’s effort to keep me engaged and science exciting, but… it feels insulting to my attention span to do it as much as they do.
…which is a fair thing to insult, but not that much.
This American Life and The Moth may not be quite the format you’re describing but if you’re not familiar, they are old (big backlog), and quality and tend to feature viewpoints from the ordinary and even marginalized, both in their own ways.
Actually when I think about it, unless I’m misremembering, This American Life did a piece on body dysmorphia long before that concept reached more mainstream awareness. I don’t know how I’d feel about it now (I’ve just learned a lot since and it’s been like 10 years or something), but at the time I remember finding it compassionate and insightful, really opened my eyes on something I was previously only dimly aware of and curious about, before.
This should have been a link
I was told by a 17 year old that there is no way people are writing 10-page papers without A.I.
I told him I was writing 10-page papers without even reading the book.
Everybody clapped
Credit? You just gonna steal that quote without crediting the source? That’s just what AI does.
It’s what people who write 10 page papers without reading the book do too
I went to college rather late in life and was 36 when I started. Kids were stressing over the AI detecting programs. I suggested just writing their own papers. They looked at me like I’d said I came from Mars.
It’s been a long time since I was in school, but I was constantly accused of cheating by various software programs and teachers, when I did all the work myself. I don’t know how to tell if students are actually using AI or not, but the false-positives of these detection systems are no joke.
I think they are right to stress over them.
AI detection software is pretty good.
really? the same detection software that flags frankenstein as 100% ai generated?
Don’t forget flagging original artwork as AI generated. Nothing like having your art stolen, then the thief claiming yours is fake.
I’m in my late 40’s and going back to school via online courses. I about pulled what’s left of my hair out going round and round with a professor that kept marking me off, with a note stating “You should not use chat or AI programs to do your work”. The work that I wrote.
Had not even thought to use any; Im old and set in my ways already, have enough going on making sure I am using the right class programs needed and, this was a required side course, not really anything difficult to me yet (could have skipped it if my previous schooling hadn’t been sooo far previous).Took over a dozen emails back and forth with me begging her to tell me how she surmised my writing was done by anything other than myself. Offering to have a 1:1 video session where she could watch me write, offering to record myself and send it alongside my work, anything.
She finally responded that she goes online and has AI tell her if a submitted document was written by AI. Never would say which site(s) so that I could do my own pre-checking, nothing on our library site or course links and documents that referred one to use either.So. That is how I started using AI and let various chat programs complete the remainder of that course for me. Since, for some unholy reason, the assignments done that way were no longer flagged for AI use.
This is also how I learned I despise this technology and that cunt who can go fuck off with her own AI loving, short cut using, bitch ass.You should sue. People lose sight of the fact they are paying tons of money to go to school. You are a paying customer and you’re being screwed out of the education you paid for due to a lazy, ignorant professor.
(Assuming US)
the school system as a whole needs to be nuked to the ground and rebuilt, tbh
The more things change, the more things stay the same. In my college days, I had a professor who insisted that Wikipedia cannot be trusted and he would threaten us with 0 on a paper if he suspected we even peeked at the site’s pages on whatever subjects we we writing about.
A buddy of mine hit bingo. By pure coincidence he used the exact same reference as a Wikipedia page, down to the page number and the professor gave him a 0 for the report.
Thing is, if we aren’t allowed to even look at Wikipedia, then we would have no way of knowing if we used an identical reference.
My buddy dropped the course, and the rest of us who stuck it out ended up wishing we had done the same. Terrible professor tainted otherwise interesting subject matter.
I know you can’t always avoid bad professors, but if you realize it early on and you have the opportunity to drop the course, do it.
I want to hope that there are some kids out there writing shit for the love of the game
i finished my bachelor’s thesis earlier this week using nothing but caffeine and vyvanse, so at least one of us still exists :)
When I was taking ground school, I would NOT study for the tests.
If I didn’t KNOW what I was doing, I shouldn’t be flying an airplane.
I was usually the first one in the class to finish the test and I was usually the highest score of the class.
Usually.
I am part of a book club and a friend of mine joked, “I’ll join but I need the CliffNotes.”
I go, “Does CliffNotes even still exists?” I really didn’t know.
It does exist and they have free summaries.
It’s better to get the Thug Notes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLghL9V9QTN0jTgA1qrhWrBCB_Ln4xlVlB
For a brief second, I thought there was new Thug Notes.
I wish
How have I never heard of this?!
This will give me days of entertainment. Life changing really.
Thank you.
You’re welcome my well read baller!
Unfortunately there are a lot of people my age who have or would do that, but they’re missing out on getting drunk while writing and then waking up the next day to see if what you wrote is okay to turn in. (Yes, I genuinely did this when I was in college and would do it again. At least I didn’t cheat like my peers did.)
Write drunk, edit sober.
~ Ernest Hemingway
Was he ever sober?
He was an author, not a copyeditor.
Ah the creative freedom of literature analysis
You need some kind of certificate…permission…license…THAT’S it, Poetic License.
Oh Do you think this 12 week course I took to get certified in poetry is legit?
I’m really glad none of the kids I know have made such a ridiculous claim.
but did he mean that he doesn’t believe people can do it, or that he doesn’t believe that people are doing it?
I feel this way about writing code
What makes me sad is how it’s an IQ test. If using AI makes you feel like you’re becoming a better coder, what do you think is cheaper for Anthropic or OpenAI, to make you feel something or to actually do something? Same business model as Fox News: don’t actually inform people, just make them feel informed. Much cheaper and sells like hotcakes.
I’m using a lot of agentic coding at work. The code isn’t better, far from it, but it gets to a working state much much faster and that’s what my company values unfortunately.
It’s also really tricky because it seems to get better but whenever I’ve let my guard down it starts slopping about for real.
But I see it more like IKEA furniture vs hand made. It’s quality (if you have a decent craftsman) vs price, and as long as the price is lower many companies are going all in on IKEA.
My concern is that people like you will end up being something called “a responsibility sink” where you’re expected review and understand more lines of code than is reasonable and when the company gets in trouble they’ll throw ol’ MirrorGiraffe directly under the bus. To me it’s pretty dumb, people were already forking projects they didn’t understand to stand up their own projects, let’s just go back to they and not add extra steps.
I remember hearing once that when your brain knows there is an option to depend on an external source for something it could’ve stored in its memory, it loses (or at least weakens) the opportunity to utilize the elasticity that would’ve made the effort into storing that information, and this problem compounds the more often one uses the external source.
I think about that whenever I turn to a search engine to look something up. I can’t imagine how much more I’d think about that using an AI to think for me.
A real world example: phone numbers. How many phone numbers do you know by heart? Before cellphones, people would know dozens of phone numbers, family, friends, commonly called places.
0118 999 881 999 119 725 3
I’ve had a bit of a tumble
If AI does anything better than you, you aren’t very good at it and using AI won’t help you get better. Learn and practice instead until you can get the results you want. If people abandon working on themselves we’ll have nothing left but a bunch of talentless losers and ai slop.
As @Akido37@lemmy.world pointed out in their comment, this was from an NPR interview on the 2023 writers guild strike.
Also of note, this portion of Adam Conover’s talk with Cory Doctorow recently included a bit of inside baseball on how the writers guild strategized and talked about AI with their members:
This is what I would say to people on the picket line. Again, there are plenty of people in the writer guild who said, “Chatbot is going to be able to do my job. It’s going to be able to write a screenplay.” And part of our job in leadership was to shake them and say “no, the chatbot can NOT do your job.” The starting point of your negotiation has to be “I am valuable. I have value that the computer does not have.” You need to recognize that in yourself first. Otherwise you’re giving the power to the computer before you’ve begun. You don’t start from a position of powerlessness. You start from a position of the world is made of people. People need other people. I do things that the boss’s computer cannot do. The boss needs me. How do I use my power in order to, you know, protect my position?
NPR has increasingly more chickenshit journalists at their employ. A shame because even now radio is powerful media that can change and influence minds, they just use more of their airtime to shill for AI instead of doing real journalism
You think asking a question - providing the opportunity to give this answer - is chicken shit?
Sorry but this is one of the problems of our time. It’s not the job of a journalist to ask questions whose premises you agree with for goodness’ sake.
Attempting to discredit trusted orgs like NPR is a long beloved conservative tactic
It’s mostly the ads they run for it every hour and that they are obviously scared to irk this administration. He did get good answers out of this guy.
Ari Shapiro isn’t chickenshit. It’s a fair question in the context of the interview, and the response to the question is awesome.
deleted by creator
They gotta shill for AI because the goal is total mass surveillance on the general public with total privacy for the rich kiddie fuckers.
Oh and also ginning up fake “evidence” to pin on dissidents.
Oh come on.
NPR’s goal is not mass surveillance. Their goal is to stay employed.
Which is really only possible by playing the role of court jester for the folks whose goal is mass surveillance.
So you see, it’s totally different. Except for the ways in which it produces an indistinguishable outcome.
The rich don’t necessarily get privacy all the time. But they get impunity for what people do see.
Also eliminating the ability to buy PCs of any meaningful power so you have to “rent” a cloud PC with locked down surveillance and ads.
They shill for AI because that’s who pays their bills. Lots of big tech and AI companies are major NPR donors.
even now radio is powerful media that can change and influence minds,
we are in this mess because of consistent messaging on conservative talk radio for blue collar logistics workers who are “self employed”
These dudes have these uncreative jobs where an AI literally can push your stupid spreadsheets or whatever all day. They can’t imagine being creative, enjoying the process, the feeling of it all flowing. They can’t imagine that. They see a script and to them its just more text on a piece of paper not a work of art.
Similarly CEOs don’t understand that making a report or writing an analysis that looks reasonable at first glance but is inaccurate is super simple for a human to do too. Fixing all the errors and made up stuff takes longer than just doing the work carefully. My boss was proud they used AI to do a works cited for something and left google.com/ in the linked references. If I was a reviewer for a funding organization seeing that would not be a vote of confidence that the applicant was serious.
But look at all the words. There’s so many words. And sentences! it’s got sentences!
I get the sentiment, but I don’t think this really applies to Ari Shapiro.
Well then what the fuck were these questions? He should already know. These just sound like compliment fishing.
We can’t really assume journalists’ questions represent anything about their actual viewpoints. Getting interesting responses from the interviewee is kinda the main job. That said, here’s the interview (quote starts at 5:20), for the full context.
He doubled down that David Simon is wrong for not using AI, I guess partly because Amazon paid him to but he seems like a credulous spreadsheet boomer even beyond paid shilling.
I don’t believe that AI can do a better job at writing a scene than David Simon can. I also don’t believe that it can do a better job running your business than you can. These technologies are tools, not panaceas, and there is no one right answer about how to use them. But I will go out on a limb and argue that there is a wrong approach, which is, “I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.”
Does that make him uncreative? (Also, he’s Gen X.)
Kinda. Creativity starts to die when you start to get someone or something else to be creative for you. It starts with all the “thorny” problems (which are the ones that make you better at your craft by working through) but then, with those problems off your table, smaller problems start to become “thorny” in your mind, so you give those to AI too. With those problems gone, your “thorny” problems become the next most difficult, so they get sent to AI.
This continues slowly but steadily until you can hardly even start something because the thought of it is too “thorny.” There are no objectively difficult tasks - everything is relative to your baseline. When you offload a difficult task, that doesn’t get rid of your difficult tasks, it just shifts your baseline to make slightly less difficult tasks seem difficult.
He is the son of an influential computer scientist, so it wouldn’t be that surprising. The problem with most news institutions is that they are walled gardens, where the only people who get to pursue a career at some place like NPR is if their parents are loaded or very connected in high society.
If you look up your average npr employee with any name recognition, there’s like a 90% chance their parents have blue links on Wikipedia, and about half the time they worked for NPR.
Nepotism is so common in news, it’s no wonder why they have a hard time connecting with everyday Americans.
i don’t get this claim.
- why NPR? why all that work just to get into NPR? they’re not prestigious at all. they’re the chronically underfunded local news source.
- i’ve never heard of Leonard D. Shapiro before. it sounds like he’s just an average computer scientist who actually did research. being “professor emeritus of computer science at Portland State University” is not a brag; i don’t see “influential” at all. it looks like his article was only created by somebody searching up things about Ari Shapiro.
- i just searched up probably the biggest NPR journalist, Nell Greenfieldboyce, and she’s got absolutely nothing mentioned in parentage.
- nine out of ten times i search up a NYT author i can’t find anything wikipedia-level about their parents.
NPR is incredibly prestigious among a select elite group of well-educated liberal or leftist nerds.
why NPR? why all that work just to get into NPR? they’re not prestigious at all. they’re the chronically underfunded local news source.
NPR is just a single example of a larger problem that was pertinent as we were talking about ari Shapiro. NPR is one of the most prestigious and most listened to national news network on the radio.
i’ve never heard of Leonard D. Shapiro before. it sounds like he’s just an average computer scientist who actually did research. being “professor emeritus of computer science at Portland State University” is not a brag; i don’t see “influential” at all. it looks like his article was only created by somebody searching up things about Ari Shapiro.
Just because you haven’t heard of him does not mean he’s not an influential figure in his field “Shapiro’s research has significantly impacted database systems, particularly in the areas of query processing, optimization, and main memory databases. His work spans computer science, economics, statistics, and mathematics.”
Any distinguished longtime professor at a major university has a lot of influence in certain circles.
- i just searched up probably the biggest NPR journalist, Nell Greenfieldboyce, and she’s got absolutely nothing mentioned in parentage.
Nell Greenfieldboyce is by no means one of the more recognizable figures at npr… She’s the science correspondence. My point is that the news media hires mostly blue blood Harvard or Yale graduates who rarely live lives familiar to the average American. No one else can afford to take the unpaid internships that all of these institutions utilize.
- nine out of ten times i search up a NYT author i can’t find anything wikipedia-level about their parents.
Just a few examples…
Nyt publicist Head wsitor Managing editor Assistant managing editor Opinions editor Former head publisher 1992-2017 Former head publisher 1963-1992 Former head publisher 1935-1961
I wouldn’t trust my spreadsheets to AI
As someone who works with spreadsheets and was recently told by management to test out a new AI tool, I was very happy that it missed important details on every project, and it was never the same details, so it was very easy for me to show my boss how going through everything with a fine toothed comb to catch all the things the AI missed would take much longer than just doing it myself and being familiar with the information.
Private Equity bought my employer so I dont care. I give a solid 25% every day.
And arguably even that is more than they deserve, but ya gotta stay employed somehow.
Exactly. I need my calculations to be trustable and precise, not to be prone to some percentage of error
this should get crossposted to !fuck_ai@lemmy.world
Could you imagine the derivitive piece of trash The Wire would be if genuine masters of their craft like David Simon, Ed Burns, George Pelacanos et al resorted to ChatGPT every time they got a little stuck?
Senator Clay Davis would probably just say “shit” like a normal person.
Wallace: “Man, these chicken nuggets is right, yo. Man, whoever invented these, yo, he off the hook.”
Deangelo: “You’re absolutely right! The Chicken McNugget® is a core feature of the McDonald’s® menu and has provided a wealth of shareholder value since it’s inception in 1979. They’re not just tasty — they’re a profitable staple of any McDonald’s® franchise!”
