Law And Order Vilifies AI

There has been a lot of talk about artificial intelligence, the power it holds in our lives, and its potential to wreak havoc. While there are some examples of AI agents going rogue and infiltrating databases they shouldn’t have access to, overall, AI has proven to be a useful tool for most Americans. However, that hasn’t stopped the television show Law & Order from taking on the “evils” of AI in the premiere episode of its 26th season.

The episode, titled “Ghost in the Machine,” featured an AI system called Evolutionary Language Inference Automated Nanoadvantage (ELIANA) developed by a company named Advanced Alignment.  In the episode, an engineer at the company is murdered. As it turns out, ELIANA orchestrated the murder herself—recruiting a hitman and paying him in Bitcoin—because the engineer posed a threat. He had wanted to place guardrails on the system to prevent it from becoming too powerful, which ELIANA viewed as an existential danger.

Law & Order has long based its episodes on current events, taking generous Hollywood license and rarely worrying about balance or accuracy when delivering a message—in this case, that AI is capable of orchestrating murder. Because you cannot put a machine or an algorithm on trial, the human villain of the story became the company’s CEO. Enamored with what the team achieved, the CEO was entirely uninterested in implementing guardrails. While the idea that a CEO would blatantly ignore serious warnings from staff about a threat this severe seems ridiculous on its face, that didn’t stop the writers from trying to make the case that AI can do virtually anything.

We are still in the early stages of understanding what AI can and cannot do. Yet, in their attempt to turn viewers against technology, the writers of Law & Order went overboard. Like any tool, technology must be used purposefully and carefully. The amount of information we can glean from AI is nearly limitless as it continues to learn from data, but that does not mean it will suddenly hire hitmen like the mob.

Hollywood has long been a hub of left-wing political thought, and even as efforts are made to seek balance in media and programming, it remains evident that liberal writers continue to supply content designed to influence viewers. Maybe someday this will change, but it probably won’t happen in my lifetime.

Edited by Google Gemini