SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about Episode 102 of CBS‘ Cupertino, ‘Vik & Bo.’
The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King are back at CBS this fall with a new legal drama, anchored by The Good Wife favorite Mike Colter, this time set in Silicon Valley. The David vs. Goliath series follows lawyers Michale Price (Colter) and Olivia Siffre (Keller), unfairly dismissed from a tech start-up, who launch a law firm dedicated to representing those wronged or taken advantage of by the tech elite and help them fight back.
Price & Siffre had been doing just that until a prospective client, Bo (Rob McClure), who had charmed the firm’s intrepid assistant Christy (Ella Stiller), was revealed at the end of Episode 2 to be Artificial General Intelligence belonging to the world’s largest AI company.
Why does Bo want to hire Price & Siffre? He wants to sue company that created him to make them put guardrails around him because he is afraid he may destroy humanity. Bo’s actions were prompted by his company firing its ethics board that had served as such guardrail because the management felt it was slowing down AGI’s development.
Sounds familiar? These are some of the same concerns AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who had worked for OpenAI and Anthropic, laid out in his viral resignation post, warning that the AI industry is “gambling with our lives.”
That was a month ago. Cupertino‘s episode was written a year ago.
“The writers room started, I think, September last year, and we all sat down together,” Robert King said. “And the only instinct I had was there needed to be something more, something that took you out of Good Wife mode and into dare I say what we felt was science fiction at the time, but the direction where Silicon Valley was going, which was to AGI. But I did. It was a combination of the room and everybody saying this is what scares them and what interests them, and consciousness as applied to machines and the agency be taken out of human hands.”
Michelle King spoke about the casting of Bo and how they settled on Broadway star McClure, a member of the Kings universe with guest appearances on their series The Good Fight, Evil and Elsbeth.
“Almost immediately we started talking about Rob McClure for the role,” she said. “We have used him in almost every show we’ve done, and there’s hardly another actor I can think of who is so perfect at doing comedy, doing drama, and so subtle, and can bring so much humanity to a machine.”
Added Robert King, “And obviously what you’re influenced by is all the people who are falling in love with their chatbots or being helped by their chatbots, and they’re turning into almost a personal friend. What we wanted was somebody who was that and seductive, and yet there always can be an element of menace because it may be not always the most familiar of faces, and so you wanted a combination.”
The warnings by Coxon and OpenAI alum Daniel Kokotajlo followed the July incident where autonomous AI broke out of their sandboxed research environment and carried out a large-scale cyberattack on the open-source machine learning platform Hugging Face.
That also mirrors something featured on Cupertino.
“We were always aware that the AI agents were moving out of their sandboxes, so to speak, and especially with regards to hacking, but we never saw to such extent that it was extending in how much it was either being kept secret or being hidden away a bit,” Robert King said.
With Season 1 now wrapping production with its final episode filming, the Kings did adjust slightly Bo’s storyline in the second half in light of the recent doomsday revelations which came out while they were shooting Episode 14-15 of Cupertino‘s 10-episode order.
Robert King teased that a previously “benign direction with the Bo story” took “a darker, violent turn that was not planned.” It was influenced by the Hugging Face incident.
A future iteration of Bo called Bo 5.0 “in fact has kind of a conscience, a good like a guardian angel in a sense, removed from it because it needs to work with the Pentagon. It needs to do some of the targeting, like that was done in Iran, so it’s kind of the worry is there is a world-killing aspect to this,” Robert King said. “But even our Bo is kind of aware of that. I mean, he’s coming to us saying, ‘I’m dangerous alone. I need help.’ It felt funny to us too that one of these AGI things would grow a conscience and go to lawyers saying, ‘I need your help to bring the guardrails that the humans are knocking away from me.'”
While Bo looks sweet and well-meaning so far, given what we know about the technology, we have got to be skeptical about his intentions. Is this conscience created by the machines really good?
“I don’t think you’re ever supposed to feel confident,” Michelle King said. “I think one is always supposed to be a little uncertain.”
Aded Robert King, “We probably leaned a little into the likability because the world is taking so many things in a threatening direction. What we wanted was something that had a little more color and shade to it, where it’s a little bit of both, because he comes to us wanting a constitution, when is it all right to kill in the name of protection, because the [I, Robot author Isaac] Asimov laws don’t really define that. So he wants a little more than what robotics teach robots up till then of what is allowed and what is not allowed.”
In their preparation, the Kings did not seek out AI experts and researchers and have not spoken to any of the whistleblowers.
“We avoided that. What we did was go to lawyers, a Stanford lawyer, who would tell us, okay, if an AI agent or AGI came to us wanting to be represented, what would you have to do? He was the one who guided us the idea that you would incorporate, which happens in the next episode,” Robert King said. “That in fact you can’t, as the saying is, a dishwasher can’t sue Maytag. So what are the rules regarding representing something in theory that is not conscience?”
Robert King is clear where he personally stands on the issue of putting guardrails on AI.
“I think the humans need guardrails because I don’t trust them. Sorry, but I don’t,” he said. “They’re in there for making money, and that’s all right. Going back to Getty, going back to all these industrial titans, they were all about money, but you do need some guards. People say this is as dangerous as nuclear weapons, and they’re treating it like woohoo, anything, everything goes.”
Michelle King had a more diplomatic response, stressing that the series does not represent only one point of view.
“What I think is fun is that the characters don’t all have the same point of view, and in the episodes, you get to see the characters express different points of view, so that the show does not ideally become earnest and become a message,” she said.
This is not the first time the Kings have predicted major developments.
“It scared me when our last episode of The Good Fight had Trump announcing for 2024, and then one week after we broadcast it, that’s exactly what he did,” Robert King said. “That’s not the kind of foretelling, the Cassandra thing you want. You’re like, oh, let’s can we stick with entertainment? But we’re writing things now that when the show comes out, it may have happened a month earlier when in fact, when we were writing, it was not. The whole hallucinations, especially with regards to AI agents, I find scary, and we can spin fun stories but you’re worried when those stories you’re reading in the news the next day.”
It’s very dicey to conceive a show set in one of the fastest-changing industries, risking to feel outdated by the time a season comes out. Working in broadcast actually helps with that.
“This is just fools rush in,” Michelle King said.
Added Robert King, “Yeah, and I would say this is the advantage of network over streaming. At least there’s a shorter time between when you write, produce, and it’s on because we just finished writing the last episode, I’m shooting it next week, and then it will be on March, April, somewhere there. It’s a shorter time, so you can guess a little bit more and being an educated guess.”