David Simon

David Simon (born 1960) is a former Baltimore Sun police reporter who became one of American television’s most acclaimed showrunners, creating The Wire, Treme, The Deuce, and The Plot Against America. His work is defined by dense, reported realism and a moral seriousness rare in prestige TV.

The strike and the machine

During the 2023 Writers Guild strike — in which limits on AI were a central demand — Simon spoke widely against studios’ desire to keep the technology’s role in scriptwriting undefined. He told NPR that AI could not “remotely challenge” what writers do at a creative level, and when pressed on whether he would ever use it to fix a story problem, he said he would “rather put a gun in my mouth.” He warned The Hollywood Reporter that the industry would “infantilize itself” if AI became the engine of its scripts.

Simon drew a careful line. He said he had no real objection to a writer quietly using AI as an aid — no different, he suggested, than keeping a thesaurus on the desk — but fiercely opposed studios deploying it to displace the writers themselves. His fight, he insisted, was about labour and authorship, not the tool in the abstract.