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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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.
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.
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.
BTW rejecting cars is also something that intelligent and rational people can/should do.
I was told by a 17 year old that there is no way people are writing 10-page papers without A.I.
I told him I was writing 10-page papers without even reading the book.
To be fair if you read the book and formed an actual opinion rather than regurgitating the Cliff Notes you’d get a lower grade.
Ask me how I know.
I went to college rather late in life and was 36 when I started. Kids were stressing over the AI detecting programs. I suggested just writing their own papers. They looked at me like I’d said I came from Mars.
I’m in my late 40’s and going back to school via online courses. I about pulled what’s left of my hair out going round and round with a professor that kept marking me off, with a note stating “You should not use chat or AI programs to do your work”. The work that I wrote.
Had not even thought to use any; Im old and set in my ways already, have enough going on making sure I am using the right class programs needed and, this was a required side course, not really anything difficult to me yet (could have skipped it if my previous schooling hadn’t been sooo far previous).Took over a dozen emails back and forth with me begging her to tell me how she surmised my writing was done by anything other than myself. Offering to have a 1:1 video session where she could watch me write, offering to record myself and send it alongside my work, anything.
She finally responded that she goes online and has AI tell her if a submitted document was written by AI. Never would say which site(s) so that I could do my own pre-checking, nothing on our library site or course links and documents that referred one to use either.So. That is how I started using AI and let various chat programs complete the remainder of that course for me. Since, for some unholy reason, the assignments done that way were no longer flagged for AI use.
This is also how I learned I despise this technology and that cunt who can go fuck off with her own AI loving, short cut using, bitch ass.
I am part of a book club and a friend of mine joked, “I’ll join but I need the CliffNotes.”
I go, “Does CliffNotes even still exists?” I really didn’t know.
It does exist and they have free summaries.
It’s better to get the Thug Notes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLghL9V9QTN0jTgA1qrhWrBCB_Ln4xlVlB
How have I never heard of this?!
This will give me days of entertainment. Life changing really.
Thank you.
You’re welcome my well read baller!
I feel this way about writing code
What makes me sad is how it’s an IQ test. If using AI makes you feel like you’re becoming a better coder, what do you think is cheaper for Anthropic or OpenAI, to make you feel something or to actually do something? Same business model as Fox News: don’t actually inform people, just make them feel informed. Much cheaper and sells like hotcakes.
I remember hearing once that when your brain knows there is an option to depend on an external source for something it could’ve stored in its memory, it loses (or at least weakens) the opportunity to utilize the elasticity that would’ve made the effort into storing that information, and this problem compounds the more often one uses the external source.
I think about that whenever I turn to a search engine to look something up. I can’t imagine how much more I’d think about that using an AI to think for me.
A real world example: phone numbers. How many phone numbers do you know by heart? Before cellphones, people would know dozens of phone numbers, family, friends, commonly called places.
Writing is so much easier when you skip over the bit where you do writing.
As @Akido37@lemmy.world pointed out in their comment, this was from an NPR interview on the 2023 writers guild strike.
Also of note, this portion of Adam Conover’s talk with Cory Doctorow recently included a bit of inside baseball on how the writers guild strategized and talked about AI with their members:
This is what I would say to people on the picket line. Again, there are plenty of people in the writer guild who said, “Chatbot is going to be able to do my job. It’s going to be able to write a screenplay.” And part of our job in leadership was to shake them and say “no, the chatbot can NOT do your job.” The starting point of your negotiation has to be “I am valuable. I have value that the computer does not have.” You need to recognize that in yourself first. Otherwise you’re giving the power to the computer before you’ve begun. You don’t start from a position of powerlessness. You start from a position of the world is made of people. People need other people. I do things that the boss’s computer cannot do. The boss needs me. How do I use my power in order to, you know, protect my position?
