I fucking love David Simon (creator of The Wire). Being interviewed by Ari Shapiro on AI.
The text from the screenshot:
SHAPIRO: OK, so you’ve spent your career creating television without AI, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems, or saying…
SIMON: You mentioned that.
SHAPIRO: …Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don’t think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from Scene 5 to Scene 6 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.
SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.
This is the kind of interview where the interviewer is ensuring there are plenty of spots for an interviewee to be outrageous. It’s a skill, for sure.
Original 2023 Ari Shapiro interview w/David Simon on the topic of AI, with a more tempered conclusion:
I mean, if a writer wants to play around with AI as the writer and see if it helps him, I mean, I regard it as no different than him having a thesaurus or a dictionary on his desk or a book of quotable quotes. Play around with it. If it starts to lead the way in the sense that a studio exec comes to you and says, AI gave us this story that we want, that’s not why I got into storytelling, and it’s not where I’ll stay if that’s what storytelling is.
