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.
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!