Warning: Contains spoilers for Pluribus on Apple TV.
Have you watched the first two episodes of Pluribus, the new sci-fi series from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan?
It’s not only a fantastic showcase for the acting talents of Rhea Seahorn, but also a truly original mystery that makes you desperate to find out more. To say that the series has been well received so far would be something of an understatement, as it currently holds a coveted 100% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.
I watched the first two episodes, then had a look at some of the online reviews, and I think there’s something they’re all missing – Pluribus never once mentions AI, but it’s impossible for me to watch it without thinking it’s a deliberate and searing critique of our relationship with it.
A coded message
I spend my days tracking developments from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and the rest – so I’m probably more attuned to AI than most, but I think Gilligan is sending us a warning about what happens when a super-intelligent entity effectively takes over our planet, just like AI is slowly doing.
In Pluribus the Earth receives a coded message from outer space, originating from over 600 light-years away. It takes Earth’s scientists a while, but once they realize it’s a genetic code – for a virus, of sorts – they begin to recreate it and trial it on some lab rats.
When the virus inevitably escapes into the human population, the infected lose their individual personalities completely, and they start to devote themselves solely to spreading the virus, which gives them a feeling of peace that they’ve never known before. The virus replaces their personality and individual self with a link to a hive mind. During the virus’s initial infection period, people experience something akin to a seizure, which can obviously cause devastating accidents depending on what the host was doing at the time of infection. The global death toll caused by crashed cars, explosions, fire, and downed planes stands at over 88 million even as the survivors, who now share a hive mind, explain the joy of infection to the last 13 people on Earth who have so far proved immune.
The hive-minded humans now want nothing more than to care for the 13 survivors, trying to be helpful to them until one day they can crack their immunity code and bring them into their dubious state of serenity. The hive-mind humans seem startlingly benign, and can’t commit even small acts of violence at all. All they want is to help you get things done with a customer-service smile that never wavers, while at the same time, they’re slowly destroying the world you’ve previously known, and humanity itself.
What can I help you with?
Does that sound like it reminds you of something? Well, to me this is like a human embodiment of the always optimistic and cheerful chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT that I write about every day. If you look at the homepage of ChatGPT it says in big letters: “What can I help you with?”, while report after report suggests that AI is taking our jobs, the huge amounts of power it requires have devastating environmental impacts, it’s been linked to rising rates of teen anxiety and self-harm, and our economy might even crash when the AI bubble bursts.
The parallels go further. One criticism of AI is that it’s removing our ability to form genuine human connection. One thing that became apparent to me very early on in the job was how many people have come to rely on AI as their ever-present friend and emotional support. The one ‘person’ who is always there for them. This was really made clear to me when ChatGPT went down for a couple of days earlier this year. We asked our readers how they were coping with the outage and received hundreds of emails from readers desperately trying to cope while their always-reliable companion had vanished. There was a similarly massive reaction when OpenAI upgraded to ChatGPT-5 and its personality changed, becoming less warm and agreeable. A lot of users felt like their ‘friend’ had had a personality change, and they weren’t happy.
In Pluribus, Seahorn’s character resists all attempts made by the hive-mind to form emotional connections because she knows it’s not real – and that she’s not talking to a person anymore.
The question is, how long can she resist? How long before she accepts the hive-mind as her friend and stops fighting back?
Gilligan’s hive mind might be fiction, but the smile is real – glowing from every chatbot window, always ready to help, until one day we realize too late that we’ve been the ones rewritten.
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