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.
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.