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.

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[–] 27 points 10 hours ago

I never get the "generate ideas with AI" advice. AI can be useful for directing you to sources for researching an idea or poking holes in your ideas, but the ideas AI comes up themselves are so braindead and bland. If you're stuck in such a fundamental way you need to go back and rewrite sections and rethink what you're trying to do.

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  • [–] 26 points 11 hours ago (2 children)
  • [–] 70 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

    Writing is so much easier when you skip over the bit where you do writing.

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    [–] 53 points 18 hours ago (1 child)
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    [–] 96 points 20 hours ago (21 children)

    I've had this exact conversation in real life.

    I do IT work. Someone who was a heavy AI user asked me 'how was I integrating AI into my workflow' as if it was a foregone conclusion that I AM integrating AI. I told him I wasn't, that AI may be useful for finding answers to some things or photoshopping funny pictures but most of what I do is intellectual, specific to certain situations and requirements, which AI generally doesn't understand. That I can't risk AI making actual changes to my environments, so if I let AI write a plan and then I proof it myself and then do it, it's easier just to do the work myself. So that leaves the only thing AI could do for me is writing, and I'm good at writing, so I overall have little or no use for AI.

    Dude looked at me like I was an alien. Like he legitimately could not understand why an intelligent person would voluntarily reject AI. Like I said I rejected cars and I ride a horse to work. Does not compute. Here's this supposedly smart person who knows more about tech than the next 2-3 people in the office combined, and this person is completely rejecting the holy grail.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 hours ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

    at least reddit doesn't (well, didn't) consume a nonillion jiggawatts just to produce a half-shitty answer

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  • [–] 38 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

    It’s tough not to form a superiority complex these days when you hear of people who can’t compose emails by themselves.

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  • [–] 16 points 11 hours ago

    Yeah, and I think it's a symptom of a cultural problem where people think prosperity means essentially not having to do anything. The ideal is to sit on your ass and consume, while never having to create.

    But when you don't do anything for yourself and have AI or hired help do it so that you can go back to scrolling the dopamine treadmill, you eventually don't know how to do it even if you wanted to. Losing knowledge, skills, and attention span means getting more stupid, kinda by definition.

    This negative feedback loop is a form of conditioning, and it is not in our best interests. It is in the interests of advertisers, psychological manipulators, tech barons, and others who are generally the worst.

    In my case, the more I have consciously decided to take care of my own shit -- in various aspects of life -- the better I have felt. It's not the one secret to a fulfilling life, but it's an important one. And yes damn it, I sometimes use dashes.

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  • [–] 15 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    My boss had three of us on a Teams call for nearly an hour and a half yesterday because he needed our help to make one Power Point slide.

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  • [–] 11 points 13 hours ago

    To be fair, power point - if you don't regularly use it and especially if you're using a 'template' someone made - is a miserable experience.

    Add four words to a sentence - why did the fucking font size change and why did an unrelated text box shrink?!?!? I just need to add 'this has been approved' to my status deck.

    Why can't I update a blob of text? Oh, it's in the Slide Master, which has exactly one instance of this slide type in the deck.

    /rant. I haven't lowered myself to using copilot to make these changes, though.

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    [–] 53 points 23 hours ago (9 children)

    Sometimes I can just feel the neolib oozing from an NPR host and their faith in capitalism to fix all things.

    For me it really started when Freakenomics lobbed those softball questions to one of the Koch brothers, and then I had a moment of “…what the fuck are you doing? …have you always been like this? …and I’m just now noticing? …oh god …oh god! your previous episodes are so terrible too! how did I not see this?! it’s all bathwater! no baby! oh fuck!”

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  • [–] 13 points 11 hours ago

    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.

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