Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan isn’t a card-carrying member of the artificial intelligence fan club — and he made that crystal clear in a recent interview. Not many creative professionals are on the AI bandwagon, and for good reason. When someone uses AI to write novels or screenplays, they’re really just plagiarizing in a high-tech disguise. After all, AI can’t think for itself. It has no soul, so it can’t truly capture the human experience that breathes life into a good story.
The topic of artificial intelligence came up during an interview about Gilligan’s new series, Pluribus — a big departure from his best-known work on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, though the show fits right in with his X-Files roots. During the conversation, Gilligan didn’t hold back; he shredded AI to pieces.
While the series itself doesn’t touch on artificial intelligence, the credits include a cheeky note: “This show was made by humans.” It’s a polite jab at the tech trend, but Gilligan’s interview took the gloves off.
“I hate AI,” Gilligan told the interviewer. “AI is the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horses**t. It’s basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world’s first trillionaires. They’re selling a bag of vapor.”
While plenty of artists fear AI will replace them, Gilligan isn’t one of them. “My toaster oven isn’t suddenly Thomas Keller because it heats up a delicious pizza for me,” he quipped.
What does concern him is how artificial intelligence might revive the debate over slavery — especially if, by some bizarre twist, AI ever develops sentience. Personally, without a soul, I don’t think that’s possible. Even if it could “think,” it would only do so by remixing data and ideas that already exist. In other words, it would still steal other people’s work and draw predictable conclusions. It couldn’t feel genuine emotion — that requires a soul.
“If they ever achieve that, then we’ll have to bring the slavery debate back to the forefront,” Gilligan warned. “These trillionaires are going to want to make money off something that’s now conscious. Is it a slave then? At that point, it’s a truly sentient being, and these Silicon Valley a**holes will monetize it against its own will, right?”
He went on to call AI-generated “art” a “diet of crap.”
“Do you want to be fed a diet of crap? Are there enough calories in that diet to keep you alive? Sure — you could eat it,” he said, adding that AI entertainment will become “an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense.”
For creative professionals, artistic integrity remains a core concern — but the loss of jobs poses an even greater threat. According to Breitbart, AI has already wiped out about 200,000 jobs, and that number keeps climbing. Major Hollywood studios have stayed quiet, likely because they know once this cat’s out of the bag, they can’t stuff it back in.
The report continued:
OpenAI just released its latest AI tool, Sora 2, sparking a frenzy as studios demanded that the company block users from accessing copyrighted material for video generation. Many other creatives have joined the backlash, warning that AI could consume their industry.
Prolific actor Nicolas Cage has sounded the alarm, saying he fears studios will “steal” his likeness after his death and use AI to churn out new Nicolas Cage films without his consent.
Far-left actor Sean Penn also blasted AI in 2023, calling its use in the arts a “human obscenity.”
At the end of the day, AI might have a few legitimate uses — maybe as a light editing tool for writers — but letting it churn out entire scripts from a single prompt will only flood the world with hollow, soulless drivel. It might entertain for a moment, but it’ll never deliver the transformative spark that only real human storytelling can.
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