{"id":289883,"date":"2025-11-13T21:51:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T21:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/289883\/"},"modified":"2025-11-13T21:51:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T21:51:10","slug":"the-morning-show-is-over-the-top-its-warnings-about-ai-are-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/289883\/","title":{"rendered":"The Morning Show is over the top. Its warnings about AI are not."},"content":{"rendered":"

Less than five minutes into its season-four premiere, Apple TV\u2019s The Morning Show drops triggering buzzwords: layoffs<\/a>, buyouts<\/a>, and generative AI<\/a>. These issues have disrupted the media industry for some time now and have turned into fodder for the hammy, star-studded series. In the opener, UBN CEO Stella Bak (Greta Lee) announces during a town hall that, to cover the 2024 Olympics, the network will use artificial intelligence to dub the anchors\u2019 voices in different languages. \u201cIt\u2019s the first step towards total content personalization,\u201d Stella gloats, to which an employee promptly raises her hand to ask, \u201cWhat about us? Are we all going to get replaced by AI?\u201d A glance at the Institute For Independent Journalists\u2019 upsetting layoff tracker<\/a> proves this concern mirrors reality to an extent, considering the concurrent rise of OpenAI<\/a> and other such resources in the media landscape.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In TMS, Stella and UBN\u2019s top anchor, Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston), shut down that co-worker\u2019s concern\u00a0 immediately, but their private discussion reveals they\u2019re holding on by a thread and fear a potential mutiny from staffers. And as the season rolls out, UBN\u2019s dip into AI spectacularly backfires for everybody (shocker!<\/a>). Jay Carson\u2019s series has delved into timely topics before, as seen with stories about the #MeToo movement, the COVID-19 pandemic<\/a>, and the January 6 insurrection<\/a>. Along the way, TMS unravels a toxic work culture full of dalliances, betrayals, blackmail, cover-ups\u2026you name it. So it\u2019s not surprising that its latest run reflects\u2014in its trademark over-the-top style<\/a>\u2014the harmful drawbacks of bringing unreliable technology into the newsroom and trying to replace trained talent with it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Persuaded by board member Celine Dumont (Marion Cotillard), Stella unveils their AI program early to an initially positive response in episode six. But the chatbot\u2014a Stella lookalike, no less\u2014ends up exposing secrets that the real Stella foolishly confided to it, including an ongoing affair with Celine\u2019s husband, Miles (Aaron Pierre). To make matters worse, AI Stella also ridicules the company\u2019s DEI initiatives and makes racist and sexist remarks in front of a large audience. By the end of \u201cIf Then,\u201d Celine secures a promotion while Stella resigns and jets off to Italy alone after Miles abandons her. The Morning Show soapily executes this twist, but the plot itself isn\u2019t much of a stretch. AI and journalism\u2019s fusion can lead to the spread of lies and misinformation\u2014just last month, Fox News reported<\/a> on a string of AI-generated videos about SNAP benefits being cut but presented them as real before rewriting the article. It\u2019s becoming increasingly easy to deceive people<\/a> and much more difficult to distinguish between what\u2019s fake and genuine. News outlets falling for it or, worse, using this slop themselves instead of calling it out can only cause problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In TMS season four, Alex deals with this when the technology she backed becomes a roadblock for her. After she interviews an Iranian fencer, Roya Nazeri (Ava Lalezarzadeh), on live TV in the premiere, she helps Roya and her father leave the building in her car because they expressed a desire to defect. In episode two, a deepfake of hers surfaces that implicates her in plotting their escape, which could land Alex and the corporation in trouble with the FBI. With these arcs, The Morning Show furthers an important conversation about AI\u2019s misuse. Recently, Peacock\u2019s The Paper<\/a> also noted AI woes (\u201cAI can never replace me,\u201d Chelsea Frei\u2019s compositor\/reporter sarcastically claims in the series premiere as she selects stories to aggregate on the homepage), while presenting enthusiasm and passion for actual journalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Morning Show renewed for season five<\/a>Reese Witherspoon investigates a cover-up after committing one in The Morning Show season 4 trailer<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, this has been a hot-button issue in TV shows before. Sci-fi and fantasy dramas like Black Mirror<\/a>, Westworld, Person Of Interest, and Mrs. Davis wisely positioned AI as the villain or a cautionary tale. Now, the depiction seems more focused on its stressful, seemingly inevitable integration into our daily routines. Look no further than Apple TV\u2019s The Studio, which satirized Hollywood\u2019s interest in AI in episode seven, when director Nicholas Stoller pivoted to it to save time on animation. South Park<\/a> offered a takedown of ChatGPT<\/a> after Randy Marsh (Trey Parker) turned to it for marriage counseling advice. And one of the ways to process Vince Gilligan\u2019s Pluribus<\/a> is to see it as an allegory of how resorting to AI can block critical or creative thinking. (The show\u2019s credits<\/a> tout that it was made without using \u201can energy-intensive plagiarism machine.\u201d) As this tech becomes seemingly impossible to ignore in all facets of life, it makes sense that television will probe into it. While The Morning Show isn\u2019t anyone\u2019s go-to series for realism, its warnings on the subject should be taken seriously.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Less than five minutes into its season-four premiere, Apple TV\u2019s The Morning Show drops triggering buzzwords: layoffs, buyouts,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-289883","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}