(s7e10) Zuzu is cool for TV, but Completely Unrealistic – A Breakdown from an AI/Machine Learning Engineer
tl;dr at the bottom
i’m really just making this post because i feel like sometimes people watch shows like this and get unnecessarily stressed about ai. i love the show, genuinely—it’s one of my favorites to throw on during my days off—but i just want to alleviate some of that stress, because sadly, a lot of mainstream media really does enjoy villainizing ai in these oddly exaggerated ways. and when you actually break down how the tech works, most of it just doesn’t hold up.
zuzu is clearly meant to be some next-gen ai system—probably modeled after large multimodal architectures like openai’s gpt-4o or apple’s new apple intelligence framework. yeah, these models can process both image and text inputs. tools like clip, blip-2, dinov2—combined with computer vision libraries like opencv, yolov8, mediapipe, deepface—can build decently powerful pipelines for facial recognition and object detection.
technically, yes—an ai can take a photo, extract facial embeddings, and run reverse image search through services like pimeyes or even custom osint tools. people have already done this. there were students at harvard who forked meta’s ray-ban sdk, hooked it into facial recognition models and basic image search, and were able to build full online profiles from a single photo. it’s not sci-fi. it’s just good engineering and public data.
but the moment the show tries to make zuzu seem sentient enough to text nolan via imessage—after somehow knowing he bought a watch for his wife—that’s where it completely breaks from technical reality.
to make that scenario happen in real life, zuzu would need access to several layers of protected systems: 1. pii access — it would need nolan’s phone number. unless that came from a breached dataset or public record, there’s no realistic way to obtain that info just from a photo. 2. purchase data — knowing he bought a watch requires access to his card transaction history, which would mean breaching his banking data through apis like plaid or yodlee, or directly infiltrating merchant-side databases—all of which are protected under pci-dss compliance and heavy encryption. 3. device-level access — sending an imessage would either require hijacking his apple id credentials (which would trigger 2fa and device verification), or running an unauthorized applescript automation system on a mac device farm. apple doesn’t offer any public imessage-sending apis, so there’s no simple way to do this externally. 4. autonomous agent logic — even if it had access to all of the above, zuzu would still need to be running a goal-oriented agent framework—like autogpt, babyagi, or langchain agents—with persistent memory, context tracking, and independent decision-making. and none of these current systems are truly autonomous. they’re just task executors, not sentient beings.
no ai system right now has cognition, agency, or self-driven initiative. it’s all token prediction, based on the context it’s given. it doesn’t “know” you bought a gift, and it’s not capable of emotional or personal judgment. it’s code responding to structured inputs.
tl;dr
while it makes for good tv, the reality is it’s a bunch of loosely stitched concepts—some real, some fantasy—wrapped in dramatic writing. and that’s fine. again, i love the show. but it’s worth saying: i don’t want people to walk away from episodes like this thinking this is where current ai is headed. it’s just fiction, not a roadmap.