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.
SHAPIRO: You would rather put a gun in your mouth.
SIMON: I mean, what you're saying to me effectively is there's no original way to do anything, and...
SHAPIRO: No.
SIMON: Yes, you are.
SHAPIRO: That seems like a kind of absolutist take.
SIMON: Not only, I think, is it a fundamental violation of the integrity of writers and also of copyright - you know, when I sold all the scripts I sold - you know, 150 to HBO and, you know, maybe another 50 to NBC - I didn't sell them so that they could be thrown into a computer with other people's and be used again by a corporation.
SHAPIRO: So would you ever agree to a contract that saw any role for AI at all?
SIMON: No, I would not. If that's where this industry is going, it's going to infantilize itself. We're all going to be watching stuff we've watched before, only worse.
#ai #davidsimon #thewire #wga
“David Simon, Creator Of The Wire, On AI, Television and the WGA Strike (2007)” - interviewed in 2023 by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
- Link to the podcast: www.npr.org/transcripts/...