In Robert and Michelle King’s latest legal drama, Cupertino, advanced artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool being used or reckoned with in the courtrooms of Silicon Valley. It’s an actual character on the show. It looks like a middle-aged man with a hapless smile and gentle charm and a desperate need to see its trust and safety team rehired to avert an AI apocalypse. It’s absolutely absurd and more fantastical than some of the courtroom shenanigans in the show, and the exact kind of scenario ill-informed AI obsessives in politics and business might point to as our future.
Yes, maybe an AI model could one day, without any human direction, hop on a Zoom call with an avatar so realistic only an expert can distinguish it from a human. Yes, maybe an AI model could appropriate millions in Bitcoin and attempt to retain a lawyer. Yes, maybe a frontier model (the AI models at the cutting edge of development) could break containment and cause havoc for a law firm. That’s just not the actual danger of AI today. It’s a novel fear encouraged by the very people making the AI. They’re spreading their beliefs, encouraging fear, and begging politicians to regulate them—all while fighting any efforts to stop development, build protections, or actually engage with the real legal challenges artificial intelligence creates.
I have full confidence the Kings will eventually address this reality in Cupertino. Going back to The Good Wife, they’ve always run some of the most technologically literate writers’ rooms in Hollywood. That’s why Bo, the charming AI model in Cupertino, feels so offensive. The Kings usually interrogate the state of the technology with a subtle absurdist flare. With Bo they seem to be regurgitating a “reality” spread by the AI acolytes of Silicon Valley. It’s also increasingly from the poorly informed sects of the government, the business community, and Hollywood, who all seem to be losing a war of information with Big Tech and confusing the whole country in the process.
Rarely has a technology hit with the sort of Javelin missile impact of “AI.” It’s rocketed into society obliterating social norms (why respond to an e-mail when AI can!), disrupting the stock market, killing whole swaths of careers in programming, and casting a spell over anyone with money—probably because it allows people to churn out mediocre versions of things humans have traditionally been the only ones to make. Despite the major disruptions, AI has yet to deliver on the positive promises. Cancer is still cancer. Poverty is still poverty. American healthcare is still the labyrinthine horror summoned from the hellish depths by super PACs funded by insurance providers. The reason for all of that is the same reason why Cupertino has an AI character plucked from a different reality. It’s even why Donald Trump keeps insisting AI needs to be rebranded as “Super Intelligence.”
The people standing to profit off AI have been engaged in a three-year-long branding exercise that focuses on the future of AI rather than the real challenges of the present. This is inherent to the nature of artificial intelligence as a field of study. It’s a term created explicitly for marketing purposes. “Artificial intelligence” was first used to describe the academic study of machine ”thinking” way back in 1956 when Dartmouth professor John McCarthy coined it in reaction to the failure of his first name for the discipline: automata studies. McCarthy gathered academics from a number of related fields, including cryptography and mathematics, at a conference to create the new name. New York Times reporter and AI expert Cade Metz has called this decision the “original sin” of the field of study. In her book about OpenAI, Empire Of AI, author and science reporter Karen Hao agreed, writing, “So much of the hype and peril that now surround the technology flow from McCarthy’s fateful decision to hitch it to this alluring yet elusive concept of “intelligence.’”
Artificial intelligence sounded cool in 1956, the same year Robby The Robot rose to fame in Forbidden Planet. Science fiction was a rapidly growing, but still-nascent genre of fiction. People were hungry for new possibilities. The U.S. was firmly in its atomic age and looking for new ways to monetize and take advantage of its then-considerable scientific prowess. Artificial intelligence vastly oversold the capabilities of thinking robots in 1956, but the term inspired the imagination and fueled the minds of writers, who quickly adopted it to use it in comics, films, TV, and books.
That in turn fueled the minds of the plutocrats rolling out AI tools in 2026. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, and even Sam Altman have all referenced the science fiction that inspired them. Unfortunately they took the wrong ideas from films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where James Cameron makes it extremely clear that recklessly pursuing knowledge without consideration for consequences can lead to skeletal robots using human skulls like cobblestones in the future. Despite their woeful misunderstanding of all the science fiction they grew up on, these tech oligarchs are now impacting the next wave of creatives and driving people to fear human-like AI that will Skynet the next generation into oblivion.
Yet the real danger of AI in 2026 isn’t some super-intelligent computer programming deciding to nuke the whole human race (we keep those systems airgapped for a reason!), it’s AI being used to decide which programs the government should cut. It’s AI agents being let loose to find and exploit security flaws on the open web. It’s AI being used to choose military targets and the AI choosing an elementary school because the data it had was old.
None of those things are happening because AI is capable of human-like intelligence or a kind of superintelligence that trumps any human’s capability. They are happening because AI, the stuff being built and distributed by titans like Anthropic and Google, is merely the most capable pattern recognition software ever built. It is so capable that the people making it don’t fully understand how it works. It’s so capable that it’s given the illusion of intelligence or even life when confronted by people with terrific math skills and atrophied skills in the humanities. Super intelligence, or superintelligence, is a name change meant to distract from the very human problems with AI. Whatever the technology is called, “artificial” or “super,” it will still mean humans not building enough safety tools to keep more dangerous models contained, or not checking AI’s results before using them to cut a government program or bomb another nation.
In the future, superintelligence could be possible. There could eventually be AI models that genuinely process and perform all cognitive tasks better than any human. But we exist in the now, where there is a wide gap between the horrors whispered about by AI fanatics and the realities experienced by people. The horrors might one day be real, but at the moment they’re merely branding exercises distracting from the actual problems.
Alex Cranz writes about the intersection of technology and pop culture.
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