Pop Culture

Regardless of whether his own feelings seeped into the show, Gilligan has been a vocal skeptic of artificial intelligence. Tucked away in the “Pluribus” credits, it reads, “This show was made by humans.” It’s an important reminder as Big Tech continues to infiltrate Hollywood, and the trillion-dollar companies behind shows like “Pluribus” are also driving the future of AI.

“I hate AI,” Gilligan says with a chuckle. “AI is the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit. It’s basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world’s first trillionaires. I think they’re selling a bag of vapor.”

Gilligan isn’t afraid of artificial intelligence trouncing on the work of true artists — “My toaster oven isn’t suddenly Thomas Keller because it heats up a delicious pizza for me” — but his sci-fi brain buzzes at the looming threat of “the singularity,” or when AI develops “a true sentience that has its own soul, and therefore its own identity.”

“If they ever achieve that, then the whole discussion of slavery has to come back into the forefront of the conversation,” Gilligan says. “These trillionaires are going to want to make money on this thing that is now conscious. Is it then a slave? At that point, it is a truly sentient being, and these Silicon Valley assholes are going to monetize this against its own will, right?”

He pauses, and then remembers why we started talking about AI in the first place. “That’s the story I would write,” he says. “But that’s been done to death.”

Closer to home for Seehorn is the recent media flurry around an AI “actress,” Tilly Norwood, supposedly soliciting talent agencies. “I’m fine going on the record that I don’t think any agencies should represent that AI actress,” Seehorn says. “Shame on them!” (Many of the major agencies and guilds in Hollywood have since spoken out against the creation.)

Meanwhile, video-generating software like OpenAI’s Sora showcase the inevitability that AI content will funnel into the mainstream. The question Gilligan has for audiences is: “Do you want to be fed a diet of crap? Is there enough calories in a diet of crap to keep you alive? The answer is yeah, probably. You could eat it.”

He goes on, about how AI-generated content is “like a cow chewing its cud — an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense,” and how the U.S. will fail to regulate the technology because of an arms race with China. He works himself up until he’s laughing again, proclaiming: “Thank you, Silicon Valley! Yet again, you’ve fucked up the world.”

He sounds like Carol Sturka, screaming about the barn on fire, before Seehorn offers a glimmer of optimism. Sure, you can prompt an AI to paint you a Picasso, but “even if a computer could make you think there was impasto brushwork there, the reason the painting is moving is because of the human experience that went into transferring that art onto the canvas,” she says. “That matters to me. I think it matters to most people.”