Simon Rich on the Messy Reality of AI

It’s refreshing to see a creative professional call out the "demo effect" we've been seeing with generative AI. Most of us see the curated, perfect output in a marketing video, but Rich points out that getting to that one usable result often requires wading through a mountain of hallucinations and weird glitches.

From my perspective, this highlights the difference between generating content and crafting it. AI is great at mimicking patterns, but it lacks the intentionality and taste that a human writer brings. For a comedy writer, where timing and irony are everything, a "mostly correct" response is actually a failure. We're currently in a phase where humans are spending more time editing AI mistakes than they would have spent writing from scratch, though the industry rarely admits this. The tool is powerful, but the "polish" is still entirely human.