As Hollywood reckons with the encroachment of generative AI in the filmmaking process — from artificial intelligence “actress” Tilly Norwood to the launch of AI-powered platform Showrunner — factions have emerged dividing creators, writers, directors and producers firmly into pro and con camps. Vince Gilligan, the multi-award-winning creator behind Apple TV‘s newest hit Pluribus, is firmly in the latter group, expanding to Deadline on his previous comments about his distaste for AI and its “detriment” to human creativity, what he views as the most important way people can assert their agency.
“I do not care for AI,” he began in an interview tied to the release of Pluribus, the credits of which include a disclaimer about the series being entirely human-made, “but I’ll try to be magnanimous and say that anytime a new technology is created, I have to believe that the central impetus of it is to make the world a better place. It’s just that, as this technology progresses, I don’t see how it will make the world a better place, but maybe it will, because I’m wrong more than I’m right. It depends on what the heck you’re creating a technology for, but more and more, it just seems to be clear, either explicitly or implicitly, that this technology is being designed to take work away, creativity away, creative endeavor away from human beings.”
Indeed, many tech CEOs have been openly hostile toward workers’ rights and nonchalant about their AI products’ potential impact on the already suffering job market. Edward Saatchi, CEO of the Amazon-backed Fable, which bills itself as the “Netflix of AI,” has signaled that he sees the tech as “possibly the end of human creativity” — a statement he does not view as alarming. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has floated the idea that any jobs curtailed or entirely eliminated by AI may not have even constituted “real work” to begin with.
Gilligan said of his disconcertment with the technology: “When your selling point is: ‘This thing is great, it’ll write your high school essays for you, it’ll create your artwork for you if you’re an artist, so you don’t have to actually learn how to draw and paint anymore … You don’t ever need to learn how to read a map or use a compass … this thing will wipe your butt for you.’ What’s left to live for? The creative spark in human beings — it’s one of the most precious, wonderful things we have. What is more important than being creative?”
The Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator noted that “everybody is a storyteller,” not just those “lucky enough” to be paid to create on a large scale like himself. “We’re all telling stories. We’re telling the stories to each other of who we are. We’re listening to stories from people we love and people we hate, and they’re, all of them, important.”
The four-time Emmy winner cautioned about what would be lost should everyone cede their talents to a machine.
“I’m talking about everyone who will be robbed by this, not just the fat cats who, like myself, make a living at it; anyone who gives up any kind of painting or music creation or writing — you’re giving up a part of yourself,” he said. “If you elect to have a machine do those things for you, you’re losing something. You’re losing a part of yourself. You’re losing an agency, to use a word from Pluribus, that you would otherwise possess, that you no longer have at your disposal.”
While the multi-hyphenate said he’s “sure there’s a place for AI” — though perhaps not in writing — and that he’s attempting to be “open-minded … I just don’t see the benefit, I only see the detriment. And I’m not even talking about the, like, Skynet and The Terminator. I think before it ever gets to that, we’re not even going to want to live because our creative spark has been taken away from us, and no one knows how to construct a sentence anymore, no one knows how to think critically because this stuff has taken over. But I’m not worried, oddly enough, about the Terminator outcome, because we have not reached the singularity yet, as much as some of these sales departments of these AI companies would tell us otherwise. That this thing does not think, it has no consciousness, it knows as much about what it’s creating for us — writing, drawing — as my toaster oven knows about the toast it’s currently heating up for me. It doesn’t know anything. It’s a hell of a parlor trick. It’s like the world’s most expensive parlor [trick].”
When I mentioned that a colleague of his, Guillermo del Toro, has expressed similar staunch anti-AI sentiments — with the Frankenstein helmer saying he’d “rather die” than participate in the AI hype — Gilligan said, “I love Guillermo del Toro, what a genius he is. Please quote me on that, because he’s an international treasure. And a guy that creative, the thought of a guy like him giving up the thing that animates him as a human being…”
Gilligan has also invoked death while talking about his disdain toward AI, telling Polygon recently: “I have not used ChatGPT, because as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it.”
Though Pluribus — about an extraterrestrial virus that transforms everyone on Earth, save 12 humans, into a relentlessly optimistic single-minded collective — has largely been read as a potent allegory about the dangers of an obsequious, intelligence-generating entity, Gilligan’s ideation predated recent advents in gen AI.
The first two episodes of Pluribus are currently streaming on Apple TV.
