Inkoo Kang writes that the technology is now popping up onscreen in everything from “The Morning Show” to “St. Denis Medical”—but nothing on air this year could compete with reality.
It’s unfortunate that, just as A.I. has truly permeated American life—and begun to be responsible for individual tragedies of the type “Black Mirror” once excelled at depicting—the series has fallen into creative bankruptcy.
The A.I.-centric episodes that premièred this year are not timely provocations but fantastical larks, wholly divorced from today’s debates about how or whether it should be deployed. One such case is “Hotel Reverie,” which sees a modern-day actress named Brandy Friday inserting herself in a gender-swapped and race-bent remake of a black-and-white nineteen-forties romance in which her character has an extramarital affair with an unhappy heiress . Historically, “Black Mirror” ’s power has come from its believability, but nothing about this particular chapter is persuasive: the tech is nonsensical—Brandy’s consciousness is uploaded into an experimental device that somehow allows the heiress to access the memories of the actress who plays her—and the burgeoning relationship between the two women is devoid of sparks. Suddenly, the rise of A.I. is less an existential threat than a pretext for a bland romance. “The Morning Show,” with its fixation on the recent past—the #MeToo movement, the pandemic, the insurrection—instead of the not-too-distant future, is in some respects “Black Mirror” ’s inverse. Given this ripped-from-the-headlines tendency, it was perhaps inevitable that A.I. would eventually appear. In the new season, it’s treated as a recurring, shapeshifting threat. The Apple TV drama, which began as a workplace soap about an A.M. news program, has gradually broadened its scope to encompass the fictional network’s fight for relevance in an overcrowded media ecosystem. Executives’ initial efforts aren’t promising. As the 2024 Olympics approach, the broadcaster develops buggy, A.I.-powered real-time translations of its stars’ commentary on the Games in a variety of languages. The feature proves so unreliable that it’s shelved—though not before one of the anchors gets a lesson on the danger of deepfakes. Later, a network chief makes the mistake of using the company’s in-house chatbot as a sort of therapist. Her secrets are then divulged in a sequence that’s peak “Morning Show”: extravagant, unrealistic, and unapologetically camp. In 2025, A.I. seems to pop up on TV nearly as often as it does in real life. On the hospital-mockumentary sitcom “St. Denis Medical,” a curmudgeonly physician resents the unerring faith that a patient has in his A.I. diagnostic tool. In the high-school-set comedy “English Teacher,” an idealistic educator campaigns for “smart” trash cans, only to discover that the new camera-equipped bins are part of an elaborate data-harvesting scheme. And in the Hollywood satire “The Studio,” a production company’s revelation that one of its projects will rely on A.I. animation causes major backlash. Some shows have taken a more sympathetic approach. The Apple TV dramedy “Murderbot,” based on Martha Wells’s book series, tries to see things from the point of view of its titular hero. The story takes place on a far-off planet, where the self-named Murderbot is tasked with insuring the safety of a group of scientists studying unpredictable local fauna. While the researchers bicker with one another about how much dignity to accord the android—is he a machine or a slave?—Murderbot obeys their directives with the sullenness of a put-upon teen-ager and snarks to himself about their tiresome “exchanges of words and fluids.” The twist is that Murderbot isn’t particularly concerned with helping or destroying the people around him; he’d simply prefer to fritter away his off-duty hours bingeing cheesy space operas. It is his Bartleby-esque recalcitrance, in fact, that makes him feel most human. Unexpectedly, the 2025 series that channels contemporary A.I. anxieties most effectively is a sci-fi drama set in the twenty-second century, in a universe where artificially intelligent flunkeys have already become obsolete. The “Alien” film franchise has long been noted for its populist, cyberpunk-esque perspective; in the original movie, the primary characters are interstellar merchant mariners deemed expendable by their employer. The new FX prequel series “Alien: Earth” renders the evils of corporate exploitation yet more explicit: its chief antagonist, a haughty man-child who calls himself Boy Kavalier , is a trillionaire with no compunctions about deceiving the vulnerable or endangering the planet to advance his own agenda. The world of “Alien: Earth” has no practical government; after the collapse of democracy, five megacorporations took over. Technological marvels do little to ameliorate the hardscrabble existence of most workers; sixty-five-year labor contracts are the norm. Extraterrestrials aside, the show’s portrayal of internecine battles between callous, self-involved plutocrats at the expense of pretty much everyone else doesn’t feel too far removed from our own situation. In May, the C.E.O. of a prominent real-life A.I. firm predicted the elimination of half of all entry-level white-collar jobs by 2030—even as talent wars within the field enabled top researchers to command nine-figure pay packages. The contrast has prompted doomer jokes about an impending “permanent underclass.” Meanwhile, various large language models have absorbed vast swaths of data, sometimes through illegal means, and A.I.-generated images and videos have ushered in a terrifying new era in which people have less control than ever over their likenesses and those of their loved ones. This month, the release of the text-to-video app Sora 2 forced the daughters of Robin Williams and Martin Luther King, Jr., to plead with the public to stop sending them deepfakes of their fathers. The way A.I. is rupturing relationships, institutions, and truth itself has given our current moment the air of science fiction: every day brings new reports of chatbots becoming objects of romantic obsession, pushing users toward psychotic breaks, or encouraging teen-agers to kill themselves. As commentators on both sides of the A.I. divide frequently note, either as a promise or a threat, this is the worst the technology will ever be. Hollywood will have to confront—and compete with—that reality if it’s to help make sense of what’s to come. ♦
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Dystopias
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