‘There’s no shortage of terrifying technology’: How AI became the new villain in TV drama | television

MMaybe the “H” in Line Of Duty will turn into “Hard Disk”? After all, AI has become TV’s favorite villain, as proven once again in the penultimate episode of BBC stablemate The Capture last week. At long last, evil puppet master Simon is revealed to be no longer a person.

“Wait, Simon is a computer?” asked a puzzled agent. “It’s a little more than that,” replied one of the arrogant senior army men. “We use AI to support, plan, execute and command operations. Simon takes into account more risks and variables than you can know on the ground. Tell it your objective and it will calculate your mission and recalibrate it for you in real time. The stats don’t lie. Simon saves lives.”

That’s right, they call him Simon because they do what Simon says. The third series of the surveillance thriller saw Met Detective Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) promoted to acting head of counter-terrorism unit SO15. Our blunt heroine continued her campaign against the elusive digital practice of “correction,” which hacks CCTV channels with fake images to criminalize those deemed enemies of the state.

Curry has now delved deeper and discovered that the patch is being deployed by senior military officers. The British Armed Forces have handed over the reins to a bloodthirsty robot. Simon even orders the assassination of the Interior Minister (Baba Essiedu), while ignoring the rogue soldier who pulled the trigger (Killian Scott) as “just a cog in the machine.” In Sunday’s action-packed finale, can she bring down a conspiracy between the deep state and big data? In a series of shocking deaths, will Carrie survive to scream another day?

“The Capture turns out to be more rooted in reality than I intended,” says show writer Ben Channan. “I follow a lot of news, so issues in the headlines naturally find their way into the show. Disinformation and deepfakes seem more pressing each season. It often feels like the world is catching up to The Capture. There are war drums beating throughout this series. I never thought we would be teetering on the edge of a real war when it airs.”

Drones, advanced artificial intelligence, and software from the likes of controversial data company Palantir are changing the face of modern warfare. This technological arms race has been reflected in conflicts from Iran to Venezuela, and from Gaza to Ukraine.

“There was always triage in hospitals or on battlefields to determine who should be operated on first and who was most likely to survive,” Chanan says. “Now they’re using AI to make those decisions, so it’s easy to imagine the military deploying it to design entire operations. We’ve taken that to the nth degree. What if a defector regiment tests the AI ​​and becomes completely dependent on it? To the point where the AI ​​keeps changing their goals and they follow them blindly? If you programmed a computer to save the West at all costs, that could lead to all kinds of trends.”

Chanan’s background as a BAFTA award-winning documentary maker means The Capture is eerily plausible. “The technology is well researched and we have military consultants but there’s also serendipity. I decided that the character of Killian had to come from E Squadron, aka The Increment. They’re special forces but they operate out of the SAS and the SBS, answerable to no one but themselves and MI6. They’re the best of the best and do some dark secret stuff. Coincidentally, one of our police consultants was a former colleague of E Squadron, so we were able to get really good insights.”

Robots are coming to TV drama. Not in terms of using ChatGPT to write scripts – although with recent scandals in publishing and journalism, that’s certainly a matter of time. But with the AI ​​itself becoming a villain – even more unbeatable than human villains.

Take the big twist in last week’s madness season finale of the post-apocalyptic saga “Paradise.” Throughout series two, the city-sized subterranean hideaway is filled with talk of the mysterious “Alex”. Naturally, this mysterious figure turns out to be an artificial intelligence-controlled quantum computer – partly named after its creator’s terminally ill wife, and partly a pun (AI-ex – see what they did there?).

Flashbacks also showed tech billionaire Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) writing a literal blank check for a supercomputer that could solve the climate crisis. Her processing power develops at such a massive pace that she becomes capable of manipulating time itself, creating a possible parallel multiverse. The writer’s room included a “quantum consultant,” one of the heads of the quantum computing labs at Caltech.

Executive producer John Hoiberg, who co-wrote the finale, told The Hollywood Reporter: “A quantum computer trying to find a way to change the outcome of where we are now may seem crazy but it’s a legitimate theory. Some quantum physicists think it’s very real. Will AI save us or destroy us? Is it too dangerous? Is it manipulating things we were never meant to operate?”

Even six years ago, Alex Garland’s sci-fi thriller Devs referenced this with its disturbing depiction of a quantum computer that can accurately predict the future and reinterpret the past. Its tech mogul, played by a haunted Nick Offerman, is driven by grief for his dead child, just like Sinatra in Heaven.

Concerns about the spread and power of artificial intelligence are everywhere on television – and, ironically, especially on streaming services offered by technology companies. The latest season of Apple’s The Morning Show saw CEO Stella Pak (Greta Lee) embrace generative AI and deepfakes as part of her media empire, only to have her chatbot turn it on during a do-or-die presentation. Robo Stella revealed damaging personal information about the Real Stella, torpedoing her career. It’s hardly the most subtle warning about giving ourselves over to technology.

She also reared her miserable head in Amazon’s recent adaptation of Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta, in which a bereaved wife uses an AI robot to speak to the dead. ABC’s hit The Rookie even introduced a malicious AI-powered children’s chatbot called Zuzu; Although it was widely held to be the moment when the police procedural lost the plot. Comedy shows are embracing it, too: The new season of Lisa Kudrow’s HBO satire The Comeback is about a Hollywood studio that weathers a writers’ strike by having artificial intelligence write the script for an entire sitcom. The finale ends with an assurance to viewers: “No artificial intelligence was used in the production of this show.” Oof.

“It’s accelerating at an alarming rate, and we should all fear for our jobs,” Channan says. “People often joke that we should have ChatGPT write an episode of The Capture. You think we haven’t tried? Of course we have! It’s not good enough yet, but it’s still in its relative infancy. Who knows what it’ll be able to do tomorrow.”

Likewise, capture-style video manipulation can be exploited by both sides of the law. “I saw an article this week about the possibility of criminal gangs using AI to do their own sort of correction, and I said ‘I couldn’t have committed this crime at that time because look, here’s a video of me somewhere else.’ How can we rely on video evidence when it can be falsified? How can we trust government footage of missile launches or buildings exploding?”

The threat of artificial intelligence is no longer limited to the horror of Black Mirror or the monsters of Doctor Who. Science fiction has become reality, and Simon says, we should be very afraid. Will The Capture return for a fourth season? “Probably,” Channan laughed. “There’s no shortage of terrifying technology to write about, that’s for sure.”