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.
most fun part of writing is the part where you don’t write
Do you have any idea how many scripts I’ve not written? It’s the best part of my job.
Yes but if you don’t care if it’s good.
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 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
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.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.
Definitely!! I got that professor a 2nd time and was the same nightmare. Was told there was no way to guarantee I wouldn’t get her a 3rd time when I reached out to the school as long as I was on the honors path.
Checked my credits and requirements and I was at a point where I graduate under honors anyway, so I just dropped that path! Not worth the headaches and frustration, I would have dropped even if I hadn’t met the credit hours, just would have thought about it longer before I did. Dropped the path like 2 wks in but didn’t want to go through trying to get my class changed so I just slogged through it.
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)
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 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.
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.
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
Ah the creative freedom of literature analysis
You need some kind of certificate…permission…license…THAT’S it, Poetic License.
I’m really glad none of the kids I know have made such a ridiculous claim.
To be fair if you read the book and formed an actual opinion rather than regurgitating the Cliff Notes you’d get a lower grade.
Ask me how I know.
Same thing happens to me now because so many assignments are generated and graded by ai, so using ai actually is the best way maximize the amount of points you get.
Everybody clapped
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’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.
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.
AI cured me of imposter syndrome but led to the realization that everyone is dumber than I thought.
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.
BTW rejecting cars is also something that intelligent and rational people can/should do.
Depends on the situation. Not every place to live is walkable, or should be.
Past a certain level of population density- ABSOLUTELY. EVERYTHING should be designed with walkability in mind.
Below that though, cars can often make more sense. If you live in a suburb, there’s too much distance to walk usually, and too few people on any given route to justify regular mass transit.
Personally I’m a real big fan of ‘third mode’ transportation- bikes, scooters, powered skateboards, hoverboards, segways, etc. Things that go faster than walking, slower than cars, and (crucially) take up almost no pavement space. Get enough people on those and things can get better fast.
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.
You’d think that last sentence would make people understand HOW you got that knowledge…
If you have more than 3 brain cells to rub together maybe. But that requires recognition of the knowledge chain challenge -> experience -> learning -> knowledge. Hell even the last two (learning -> knowledge) seems beyond a lot of people.
Personally I blame our educational system. It does a shit job of teaching people to learn. It does a great job of teaching people that learning isn’t fun and should be avoided.
Combine that with ‘stranger danger’ and helicopter parenting keeping kids indoors and keeping them from unstructured unsupervised activities that lead to organic learning through experience, and you get 18yo’s graduating high school with virtually all of their learning being in school settings and virtually none of it fun. So they do it when necessary or when they don’t realize they’re doing it, and otherwise avoid it. It’s really sad.I got lucky or maybe I just had really good parents. But somewhere along the line I figured out that learning could be a ton of fun if it’s on a subject you’re interested in and if the instruction matches your learning style. So I taught myself all kinds of shit, usually by diving face first into projects I had no idea how to finish and by the time I was done I was good at it.
Like in the early days of VoIP- ‘I’m bored so let’s download some sketchy open source bullshit and route all my phone calls through a random free provider in Washington State. Oh it only runs on Linux? Guess I gotta figure out how to make Linux work then.’ Add a bunch of evenings and weekends of fucking around and without realizing it I’ve now got a marketable skill. And that ‘sketchy open source bullshit’ became Asterisk, one of the most common open source PBX systems around today.Thing is- if Claude had been around, and I used it, I’d just have said ‘Claude, I need to install CentOS linux, download the latest snapshot of Asterisk out of SVN, compile it, and set up an IP PBX. Write me a script’.
It’d think for 30 seconds and then give me the entire answer. And I’d learn fucking nothing other than how to copy and paste from Claude.It’s like all the companies that are firing their junior engineers in favor of AI… they are shooting themselves in the foot. Where you do think senior engineers come from? Do you think they hatch from eggs, fully trained and experienced and ready for a technical leadership position? No you moron they start as interns or junior engineers and they gain knowledge through experience. Get rid of the junior engineers and wait a generation or two and there will be no senior engineers to direct Claude.
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.
Hooking a random number generator up to production is a bold move.
Totally clueless about how LLMs work
They work fucking fantastic, until they don’t.
Same. Planning-with-files has saved my ass more times than I can count.
NO WAY DUDE THAT’S SO CRAZY
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.
They overcorrected to the right even before being defunded.
Just more proof that appeasement never works with Nazis
Wouldn’t doubt it, “commie news network” CNN was absolutely blasting democratic candidates while letting conservatives on to spout 30 minutes of lies with no pushback, so they’d seem “fair.” Made 0 difference conservatives still say they are unbelievably biased. Luckily all these news orgs are owned by the same billionaire so it’s unlikely to change 😴😴😴
Cool story.
- 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.
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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?
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!”
Remember how they supported genocide? Still happening.
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.
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 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.
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.
In one way that is reassuring. I was wondering if I’ll still be employed in 10 years but yeah they will need responsibility monkeys!
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.
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
They don’t even have the spine to stand up to a pedophile president who defunded them.
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.
The rich don’t necessarily get privacy all the time. But they get impunity for what people do see.
They shill for AI because that’s who pays their bills. Lots of big tech and AI companies are major NPR donors.
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.
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”
Ari Shapiro isn’t chickenshit. It’s a fair question in the context of the interview, and the response to the question is awesome.
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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.
I quote that “shit” to this day.
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!”
Side note, I watched The Corner for the first time a few weeks back. All of the episodes are on YouTube.
It’s based on the book Simon wrote about Baltimore that would eventually lead to The Wire, but all it the stories are true which makes it a major bummer at times.
The Wire DNA is there, but some of the dialogue and acting isn’t quite at that level (but is that even really fair to compare?), but once you get into it and remember it’s true stories, it’s incredibly engrossing. Proto-Wire. Barely any stuff from the cop side, not much from the dealing side, almost all from the side of the addicts living “the game” day to day.
Some familiar actors too. But the woman who plays Fran was just outstanding. Honestly seems like she wasn’t even acting most of the time. I hope she was, because otherwise goddamn… She absolutely fucking kills it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything else.
But yeah, brutal shit, be warned.
Here’s the first episode. Stick with it, they drop the fake interview thing almost immediately before getting into unfiltered David Simon magic:
Yeah, I’ve read The Corner though not seen the series in full. Highly recommend the book and also Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and you see so much of what ends up becoming The Wire in both.
I highly recommend watching The Corner if you’re a fan of The Wire.
It’s heartbreaking, but very very good. And yeah the woman who plays Francine deserves awards for that shit, I mean wow.
I never watched Homicide. I get the vibe that it didn’t hold up as well as his later stuff.
Why use AI to do all the fun stuff? It’s not like AI knows the rules of the world, the full depth of the characters, or the political perspective that the story is supposed to have. Trying to convey all that in a prompt seems like more work anyhow.
edit: The only thing I can see AI potentially being useful for is feedback, as it’s hard to get and most of it needs to be ignored anyhow. Maybe an LLM can stumble into something you didn’t notice before.
this should get crossposted to !fuck_ai@lemmy.world
