The latest drama from Vince Gilligan, the celebrated creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is more than just a sci-fi story. "Pluribus," which premiered on Apple TV+, serves as a direct and urgent critique of the age of artificial intelligence. Through its narrative of a global hivemind, the show, five episodes into its run as of early December 2025, forces viewers to confront fundamental questions about creativity, individuality, and the cost of collective harmony.
The 'Pluribus' Premise: A Utopian Nightmare
In Pluribus, an alien virus transforms almost all of humanity into a single, cooperative consciousness. These are not the flesh-eating zombies of traditional horror but beings living in apparent peace and efficiency. The hivemind rejects violence and shares the totality of human knowledge instantly among all members. This means anyone can perform complex tasks, from piloting aircraft to conducting surgery, creating a world of seamless order.
The central conflict arises from the few immune humans, led by protagonist Carol Sturka, played by Rhea Seehorn. Sturka is a commercially successful author who secretly craves critical acclaim. Her fierce independence puts her at constant odds with the collective, which she views as the erasure of human will and the soul of individual expression.
Gilligan's Clear Stance: AI as a "Plagiarism Machine"
The parallel to contemporary generative AI is intentional and unmistakable. Vince Gilligan has been openly critical of AI, famously labeling it a "plagiarism machine." This sentiment is baked into the show itself, with the credits proudly stating, "this show was made by humans." The hivemind in Pluribus acts as a direct metaphor for AI systems that aggregate and regurgitate human knowledge without the lived experience that created it.
The show asks pointed questions: Is a conflict-free world worth the loss of individual ambition and art? Does human creativity, born from personal struggle, pain, and unique perspective, hold a value that easy, collective intelligence cannot replicate?
Real-World Research Echoes the Fiction
Fascinatingly, academic research is exploring concepts eerily similar to Pluribus. An award-winning paper titled "Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)" was presented in October at the NeurIPS conference. The study found that large language models (LLMs), when given common prompts, tend to produce standardized, homogenized responses.
The authors warn that this lack of diversity could lead to the "long-term homogenization of human thought" through repeated exposure to similar AI-generated content. This scientific concern mirrors the dramatic warning of Pluribus: that a system designed to optimize and smooth out human output ultimately flattens the very creativity it draws from.
The Core Warning: The Erosion of Human Edge
Pluribus argues that AI's great danger is not a robot uprising, but a slow, comfortable erosion. Generative AI takes the sum of human achievement—forged through grief, heartbreak, procrastination, and triumph—and presents it as a frictionless, bland product. It sands away the rough edges of original thought and personal voice, turning rich expression into a flavorless "alphabet soup."
The drama posits that AI, like the hivemind, does not truly challenge, doubt, or create. It estimates, optimizes, and replicates. In doing so, it risks making us forget that the messiness of individual human experience is not a bug, but the essential feature of genuine innovation and art. As the series unfolds, it challenges viewers to value the chaotic, individual spark that defines humanity, before it is willingly traded for a peaceful, yet profoundly flat, existence.
