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.

  • JustPlainDave@lemmy.zipEnglish
    39·
    18 hours ago

    I went to college rather late in life and was 36 when I started. Kids were stressing over the AI detecting programs. I suggested just writing their own papers. They looked at me like I’d said I came from Mars.

    • dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      11·
      10 hours ago

      It’s been a long time since I was in school, but I was constantly accused of cheating by various software programs and teachers, when I did all the work myself. I don’t know how to tell if students are actually using AI or not, but the false-positives of these detection systems are no joke.

      I think they are right to stress over them.

    • Spot@startrek.websiteEnglish
      31·
      14 hours ago

      I’m in my late 40’s and going back to school via online courses. I about pulled what’s left of my hair out going round and round with a professor that kept marking me off, with a note stating “You should not use chat or AI programs to do your work”. The work that I wrote.
      Had not even thought to use any; Im old and set in my ways already, have enough going on making sure I am using the right class programs needed and, this was a required side course, not really anything difficult to me yet (could have skipped it if my previous schooling hadn’t been sooo far previous).

      Took over a dozen emails back and forth with me begging her to tell me how she surmised my writing was done by anything other than myself. Offering to have a 1:1 video session where she could watch me write, offering to record myself and send it alongside my work, anything.
      She finally responded that she goes online and has AI tell her if a submitted document was written by AI. Never would say which site(s) so that I could do my own pre-checking, nothing on our library site or course links and documents that referred one to use either.

      So. That is how I started using AI and let various chat programs complete the remainder of that course for me. Since, for some unholy reason, the assignments done that way were no longer flagged for AI use.
      This is also how I learned I despise this technology and that cunt who can go fuck off with her own AI loving, short cut using, bitch ass.

      • temptationscattreats@lemmy.zipEnglish
        17·
        13 hours ago

        The more things change, the more things stay the same. In my college days, I had a professor who insisted that Wikipedia cannot be trusted and he would threaten us with 0 on a paper if he suspected we even peeked at the site’s pages on whatever subjects we we writing about.

        A buddy of mine hit bingo. By pure coincidence he used the exact same reference as a Wikipedia page, down to the page number and the professor gave him a 0 for the report.

        Thing is, if we aren’t allowed to even look at Wikipedia, then we would have no way of knowing if we used an identical reference.

        My buddy dropped the course, and the rest of us who stuck it out ended up wishing we had done the same. Terrible professor tainted otherwise interesting subject matter.

        I know you can’t always avoid bad professors, but if you realize it early on and you have the opportunity to drop the course, do it.

      • SeeMarkFly@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        10 hours ago

        When I was taking ground school, I would NOT study for the tests.

        If I didn’t KNOW what I was doing, I shouldn’t be flying an airplane.

        I was usually the first one in the class to finish the test and I was usually the highest score of the class.

        Usually.