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’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.
BTW rejecting cars is also something that intelligent and rational people can/should do.
It’s tough not to form a superiority complex these days when you hear of people who can’t compose emails by themselves.
AI cured me of imposter syndrome but led to the realization that everyone is dumber than I thought.
Meanwhile I just plugged Claude into a production cluster to perform analysis and I accepted its suggestions for an immediate fix, while it also made those changes to my Ansible setup and committed them to git.
I think AI is great for some things, but imo it should NOT be wasted generating funny pictures or videos.
I think you’re one un-caught hallucination away from having claude eat the production database. I get that you think you’re approving suggestions, but there are many examples already of “<llm> ignored my directive of don’t make changes and then said sorry” out there.
If a prompt can make changes, then at some point a prompt will make bad changes. It hasn’t happened to you yet, apparently, but you’re playing Russian Roulette with the business.
I do agree it has some use cases, but shouldn’t be used to make pictures, video or writing text a human claims as something they produced.
We’ll see, I like to live life dangerously, especially when my org is pushing AI down our throats
That is absolutely a sentiment I can get behind. I just am afraid it’ll backfire and I’ve been lucky enough to not have to have that battle yet.
“You demanded I put AI here. This is *your* fault.”
Yes sir. Honestly I’m amazed by the work Gemini and Claude does for me, and according to my best judgment, I should never allow access to my local SSH client, but the bastards asked for this.