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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Writing is so much easier when you skip over the bit where you do writing.
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.
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.
It’s tough not to form a superiority complex these days when you hear of people who can’t compose emails by themselves.
BTW rejecting cars is also something that intelligent and rational people can/should do.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
For a brief second, I thought there was new Thug Notes.
I wish
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.)
- NPR is trash to a genocidal level.
- I love the spirit of Simon, but on the other hand I feel like sometimes it doesn’t hurt to use all tools available. I definitely would run almost any computer program over putting a gun in a mouth… I feel like this post might need a TW.
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.
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!”
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
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
