Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan calls AI a 'plagiarism machine'

Vince Gilligan is most known for creating the iconic series Breaking Bad, but has had a prolific career across film and television since the early 1990s. Like the rest of Hollywood’s writers, Gilligan is returning to work after the 148-day WGA strike. In some of his first public comments since the strike’s end, Gilligan slammed artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, calling it a “plagiarism machine” and a “marvel of marketing.”

Vince Gilligan was speaking with Variety in a recent interview when the subject of AI in Hollywood came up. For those unfamiliar, the use and implementation of AI in the writing process was a major sticking point in the negotiations between the Writers Guild of America and the AMPTP. Gilligan didn’t mince any words when asked about the technology and its impact on his profession.

Source: AMC

When I first became aware of ChatGPT or whatever it’s called, it scared the living hell out of me. I thought, ‘We’re done for as a race.’ I don’t mean in the ‘Terminator’ sense, like they’re going to start exterminating us. But who wants to live in a world where creativity is given over to machines? There goes my job. I had all those fears. And as the last six or nine months have progressed, I’ve somewhat kept abreast of this ‘marvel’ of AI. I think it’s a lot of horseshit. It’s a giant plagiarism machine, in its current form. I think ChatGPT knows what it’s writing like a toaster knows that it’s making toast. There’s no intelligence — it’s a marvel of marketing. It may well become sentient and truly intelligent. Down the line there may be a moment of singularity where it actually becomes a threat, but right now it’s just a plagiarism machine. It’s a bunch of billionaires trying to become trillionaires by selling this thing as some kind of momentous sea change. It certainly will have its uses in writing legal briefs and stuff like that, but I don’t think it’s going to take over for writers of fiction.

In the newly signed WGA deal, writers secured a number of protections against AI, including the rule that AI can’t be used to write or rewrite literary material. As the conversation around artificial intelligence continues to grow and evolve, we’ll continue to report on its industry impact.