‘The Morning Show’ makes mission to critique AI in new season

Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston can personally relate to the artificial intelligence concerns that “The Morning Show” television series unpacks in season four.

Both actors have had their real-life likenesses stolen and used in deepfake videos, a predicament that Aniston’s fictional character Alex Levy, a journalist, faces.

Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person’s image in a photo or video is replaced with someone else’s likeness using AI techniques. The incredibly realistic fakes are difficult for viewers to detect, leading to impersonation, fraud, blackmail and the spread of misinformation and propaganda.

“There’s only so much you can do to try to catch all of it (deepfakes), you know, because it’s just happening at such a rapid speed and such enormous amounts that ‘how do you control all of it?’ I really love that we’re showing that in the show,” Aniston said in an interview.

“There has to be some rules or legislation, something around how this AI is used because it is so dangerous and it’s just reckless,” the Friends hit TV series actor added.

The Morning Show, known for taking on timely political issues, addresses in season four how the news industry has changed since the last episode in 2023. Starting on Wednesday, the new season follows a group of journalists as they deal with the merger between two major fictional networks, UBN and UBA.

“I mean, we talk about the rise of the individual journalist or the rise of the individual voice,” said Witherspoon, an executive producer for the show. She also portrays Bradley Jackson, an impulsive small-town local news reporter who ends up co-anchoring the show.

“We deal with the manosphere, all the bro podcasters, people having a really strong influence over listeners in terms of their medical advice to how to vote.”

The Big Little Lies actor is proud of how the Emmy-nominated show has stayed relevant since its inception “It’s interesting how our show has charted so many different cultural movements from ‘MeToo’ to being woke to now, the anti-woke movement,” she said.

“So, we get to have this show that is talking about things that people are talking about right now at this minute, which really makes it very topical.”