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 think everyone should think of AI as that you have random access to the knowledge of reddit. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s a troll, and sometimes no one will answer. You also have to have knowledge to understand what it’s saying most of the time.
But, you have to specify it isn’t actually redditors seeing the question and posting an answer. AI doesn’t actually understand questions.
It’s more that it sees your question and generates text near that question that wouldn’t look out of place on Reddit. Sometimes what it generates is good, sometimes it’s what a troll would say, the key thing is that it’s believable but not accurate.
Right, I think we’re agreeing. That is exactly like reddit.
at least reddit doesn’t (well, didn’t) consume a nonillion jiggawatts just to produce a half-shitty answer