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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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[–] Hackworth@piefed.ca 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I get the sentiment, but I don't think this really applies to Ari Shapiro.

[–] Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 33 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well then what the fuck were these questions? He should already know. These just sound like compliment fishing.

[–] Hackworth@piefed.ca 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] yogurt@lemmy.world 8 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Hackworth@piefed.ca 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.)

[–] Signtist@bookwyr.me 3 points 11 hours ago

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.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

i don’t get this claim.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. i just searched up probably the biggest NPR journalist, Nell Greenfieldboyce, and she’s got absolutely nothing mentioned in parentage.
  4. nine out of ten times i search up a NYT author i can’t find anything wikipedia-level about their parents.
[–] teslekova@lemmy.ml 2 points 16 hours ago

NPR is incredibly prestigious among a select elite group of well-educated liberal or leftist nerds.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 3 points 22 hours ago

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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