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.

  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    87·
    23 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?