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.
I can’t quite put my finger on moments like yours, but had the same strange sensation of creeping revulsion toward NPR, where it once felt like a safe, familiar, even comforting, thing.
NPR, in a million ways small and large, carries water for the status quo, and it’s fuckin gross. Even just small ongoing things like their current phrasing “the war in Iran”. It’s an anodyne, neutral phrasing used in their broadcasts, seemingly as a rule. Same neutral language for cops when “an assailant was shot and died”, or when “a weapon discharged”, etc.
It’s never the war against Iran, it’s not “the unprovoked attack against Iran”, etc., it’s just this vague inscrutable thing merely happening, and merely in Iran. No one is responsible, and it just is there. And thankfully, it’s only IN Iran! Wouldn’t it be worse if that were spilling over into other places and things?
There are countless stronger examples, but this one is current and consistent and you can hear it in any random news broadcast, and it tells a huge lie in a tiny word every time.