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.
These dudes have these uncreative jobs where an AI literally can push your stupid spreadsheets or whatever all day. They can’t imagine being creative, enjoying the process, the feeling of it all flowing. They can’t imagine that. They see a script and to them its just more text on a piece of paper not a work of art.
Similarly CEOs don’t understand that making a report or writing an analysis that looks reasonable at first glance but is inaccurate is super simple for a human to do too. Fixing all the errors and made up stuff takes longer than just doing the work carefully. My boss was proud they used AI to do a works cited for something and left google.com/ in the linked references. If I was a reviewer for a funding organization seeing that would not be a vote of confidence that the applicant was serious.
But look at all the words. There’s so many words. And sentences! it’s got sentences!
I get the sentiment, but I don’t think this really applies to Ari Shapiro.
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.
Does that make him uncreative? (Also, he’s Gen X.)
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.
Well then what the fuck were these questions? He should already know. These just sound like compliment fishing.
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.
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.
i don’t get this claim.
NPR is incredibly prestigious among a select elite group of well-educated liberal or leftist nerds.
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.
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.
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.
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
I wouldn’t trust my spreadsheets to AI
As someone who works with spreadsheets and was recently told by management to test out a new AI tool, I was very happy that it missed important details on every project, and it was never the same details, so it was very easy for me to show my boss how going through everything with a fine toothed comb to catch all the things the AI missed would take much longer than just doing it myself and being familiar with the information.
Private Equity bought my employer so I dont care. I give a solid 25% every day.
And arguably even that is more than they deserve, but ya gotta stay employed somehow.
Exactly. I need my calculations to be trustable and precise, not to be prone to some percentage of error