AMC's new black comedy "The Audacity" has a plot point that should make anyone in the AI space uncomfortable. Created by Jonathan Glatzer, a former Succession producer, the show follows Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the erratic CEO of a company called Hypergnosis. When a major acquisition falls through, Duncan spirals. He books on-demand ayahuasca. He gets offended when a diagnostic evaluation calls him neurotypical. Then he suspects his therapist might leak damaging info about his business dealings, so he coerces an employee to use an AI surveillance platform to stalk her.
This surveillance subplot isn't speculative fiction. As Miles Klee writes in his WIRED review, Duncan uses AI to remotely track his therapist JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg) and discovers she's making insider trades based on client sessions. Data brokers already aggregate mobile ad IDs to track real-time geolocation. Tools like Maltego use machine learning to map relationships between data points. Clearview AI scraped billions of public images for facial recognition before most people knew it existed. The show's writers aren't inventing dystopian capabilities. They're pointing at tools that already exist.
For anyone tracking AI agents, the detail that matters is how casual the surveillance happens. Duncan can barely keep himself together. He has money and power. The AI does the work. Glatzer and his team get something right: the people who abuse AI tools aren't masterminds. They're just rich enough to not care about consequences. The real victims are people like JoAnne, whose privacy gets vaporized because someone with a company credit card decided she was a threat. No regulation stops this. No consent form protects her. The tools work, they're available, and the people using them answer to nobody. Palantir is a prime example of a tool that operates with such impunity.