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 28 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] Avicenna@programming.dev 2 points 1 hour ago

most fun part of writing is the part where you don't write

[–] seerdomin1983@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 hours ago

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

This should have been a link

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 26 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 1 points 46 minutes ago

Thank you! OP should be shot

[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 60 points 7 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 14 points 2 hours 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 7 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] korazail@eviltoast.org 3 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 hours ago (2 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.

[–] korazail@eviltoast.org 4 points 1 hour ago

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 " 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.

[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 2 points 2 hours ago

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

[–] Bashnagdul@lemmy.world 8 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] Doug@piefed.social 36 points 10 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 9 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 minutes 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 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

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Tangentially, the Freakonomics guys definitely didn't understand sumo well enough to give a full explanation of their data on that topic, however.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 46 minutes ago

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.

[–] yakko@feddit.uk 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 28 minutes ago

My break was just hating their editing style. Wasn't until years later when I learned they were conservative.

[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 59 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I feel this way about writing code

[–] DaveyRocket@lemmy.world 29 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 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 8 points 6 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 15 points 10 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 3 points 2 hours 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.

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[–] SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 191 points 17 hours ago (25 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 8 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] CrimeIsLegalNow@ani.social 6 points 7 hours ago

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

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[–] neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 78 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 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?

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