AI Is Sinner And Saint In Tech Thriller ‘Rabbit Hole’

For those who were traumatized by the last season of HBO SuccessionParamount+ has a winner in its latest twisty corporate thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland.

Although many documentaries have been made about the abuse of AI by giant tech companies, including Netflix The Great Hack And The social dilemmanothing like watching data devour the world in a Hollywood tale where truth is stranger than fiction.

In rabbit hole, Sutherland plays the founder of a social media startup who slips into the spy game when he stumbles upon a plot to hack the US presidential election. For fans of his past 24 And Designated Survivor series, the actor delivers similar edge-of-your-seat action that will keep the audience guessing who’s the hero and who’s the villain until the very end. The show’s creators, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, wrote it that way.

The two jumped at the chance to do the show after their agent, CAA’s Joe Cohen, who also represents Sutherland, told them the actor was looking for a new project. In just six weeks, they had written the script and were heading into production.

“It was towards the end of 2021 when we started the writers room. In September 2022, we were finishing production,” Ficarra said in an interview. “It was as quick as ever,” added Requa.

The duo have worked together since participating in the Pratt Institute film program in the 90s. Spilling hits year after year, they directed and produced last year We crashed for Hulu with Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway and before that produced the NBC series It’s us. Film credits include crazy and stupid love, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot And Focus with Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Tina Fey, Margot Robbie and Will Smith.

A venerable content machine, the two wrote rabbit hole as a multi-season story with the intention of turning it into a franchise.

“We had thought of the conspiracy movies of the post-Watergate era when nobody knew who to trust and felt the time was right,” Ficarra said.

Paraphrasing Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, he added: “People feel like they are in a period where our privacy is being invaded. And I don’t think that’s true. This is only true if you go online.

Embracing the offline life, both avoid social media and use privacy browsers like DuckDuckGo.

pretend it

In rabbit hole, there are algorithms manipulating just about everything the characters encounter, from what they think they see on TV to what they think they swipe on a dating app. And of course there’s the ubiquitous camera dictating events as they unfold. But is the Fibonacci sequence enough to help Sutherland crack the code?

In 2020, Requa and Ficarra did a series for Fox titled Following with Mad Men’s John Slattery about a tech titan who teams up with the FBI to stop a rogue AI agent. Despite killer robocars and a menacing Alexa, the show was not renewed.

“It was ahead of its time,” Requa said. “People didn’t buy it because it was almost too fantastic.”

To the future rabbit hole, he said they were unlikely to add ChatGPT as a character, just in case it turned out to be a storm in a teapot.

Ficarra isn’t afraid of smart chatbots taking their jobs either. “I just don’t know how good AI is at reading the air, analyzing conversations and saying, you’re the third person I hear mentioning that today maybe we should make a movie about it, and find out if it was done to death or nobody wants to talk about it,” he said.

And who knows, they might be right. Italy has already banned ChatGPT as other European countries with strict privacy laws assess how to regulate the technology. ChatGPT is not available in countries that censor the internet like China, North Korea, Russia and Iran, according to CNBC. And Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing chat have yet to be fully released to the public in the United States.

How to watch

rabbit hole is currently streaming on Paramount+. Other series worth watching on the network include The offeron the manufacture of The Godfather with Miles Teller and Matthew Goode, and king of tulsaabout a mob boss trying to settle in Oklahoma, starring Sylvester Stallone, of Yellowstone designer Taylor Sheridan.