Regardless of whether his own feelings seeped into the show, Gilligan has been a vocal skeptic of artificial intelligence. Tucked away in the “Pluribus” credits, it reads, “This show was made by humans.” It’s an important reminder as Big Tech continues to infiltrate Hollywood, and the trillion-dollar companies behind shows like “Pluribus” are also driving the future of AI.

“I hate AI,” Gilligan says with a chuckle. “AI is the world’s most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine. I think there’s a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit. It’s basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world’s first trillionaires. I think they’re selling a bag of vapor.”

Gilligan isn’t afraid of artificial intelligence trouncing on the work of true artists — “My toaster oven isn’t suddenly Thomas Keller because it heats up a delicious pizza for me” — but his sci-fi brain buzzes at the looming threat of “the singularity,” or when AI develops “a true sentience that has its own soul, and therefore its own identity.”

“If they ever achieve that, then the whole discussion of slavery has to come back into the forefront of the conversation,” Gilligan says. “These trillionaires are going to want to make money on this thing that is now conscious. Is it then a slave? At that point, it is a truly sentient being, and these Silicon Valley assholes are going to monetize this against its own will, right?”

He pauses, and then remembers why we started talking about AI in the first place. “That’s the story I would write,” he says. “But that’s been done to death.”

This man should direct the Dune prequel called Butlerian Jihad, but as he said, too many stories about rogue AI have already been done.