What Hollywood Is Missing About A.I (www.newyorker.com)

Hollywood is increasingly depicting A.I., but often misses what matters most: the real, systemic harms and technical realities reshaping work, privacy, and truth. Once prescient shows like Black Mirror have grown fanciful or sentimental, turning convincing thought experiments into implausible romances or campy plot devices. Other series treat A.I. as a surface threat—buggy real-time translation, therapist-like chatbots that leak secrets, or gimmicky voice clones—without engaging the harder issues the public is already living: animators and effects artists being displaced, voice-cloning used to console grieving families, and text-to-video tools (e.g., Sora 2) spawning deepfakes that imperil personal likeness and consent. The pieces that land connect A.I. to concentrated corporate power and labor precarity rather than sci‑fi mystique. FX’s Alien: Earth, set in a post-democratic world ruled by megacorporations, channels contemporaneous anxieties: LLMs trained on scraped (sometimes illicit) data, platforms amplifying misinformation, and forecasts of mass entry‑level job loss even as top researchers command huge pay. For the AI/ML community, these portrayals matter—public understanding shapes policy, recruitment, and ethical priorities. Hollywood that foregrounds corporate incentives, data provenance, and real failure modes (deepfakes, model hallucinations, privacy breaches) would better reflect and influence the debates shaping A.I.’s near future.