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.
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.