But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

(Everything here is part of the transcript from the interview)

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.

SHAPIRO: Do you think that position is where this is likely to end up?

SIMON: 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.