this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
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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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[–] DoctorWhoDMC@lemmy.world 11 points 57 minutes ago (1 children)

Writing is so much easier when you skip over the bit where you do writing.

[–] seerdomin1983@lemmy.ca 1 points 39 minutes ago

Yes but if you don’t care if it’s good.

This should have been a link

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 48 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] DoctorWhoDMC@lemmy.world 7 points 51 minutes ago (1 children)

It’s tough not to form a superiority complex these days when you hear of people who can’t compose emails by themselves.

[–] tmyakal@infosec.pub 2 points 44 minutes ago

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.

[–] Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 59 minutes ago (1 children)

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.

[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 2 points 50 minutes ago

Same. Planning-with-files has saved my ass more times than I can count.

[–] Bashnagdul@lemmy.world 8 points 6 hours ago

You'd think that last sentence would make people understand HOW you got that knowledge...

[–] Doug@piefed.social 31 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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!”

[–] Juice@midwest.social 8 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

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 middle that could precisely target a particular person, and they made a joke about how the middle 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

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 1 points 22 minutes ago* (last edited 21 minutes ago)

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.

[–] yakko@feddit.uk 1 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 55 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I feel this way about writing code

[–] DaveyRocket@lemmy.world 28 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] MirrorGiraffe@piefed.social 5 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] Doug@piefed.social 13 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] mofongo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 30 minutes ago

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.

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 5 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 74 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

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?

[–] SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 183 points 15 hours ago (17 children)

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.

[–] fosho@lemmy.ca 5 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Credit? You just gonna steal that quote without crediting the source? That's just what AI does.

[–] CrimeIsLegalNow@ani.social 4 points 5 hours ago

It's what people who write 10 page papers without reading the book do too

[–] JustPlainDave@lemmy.zip 26 points 13 hours ago (5 children)

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.

[–] dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Spot@startrek.website 20 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] temptationscattreats@lemmy.zip 9 points 8 hours ago

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.

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