Law and Order: "Human Innovation" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal, NBC-TV, aired January 25, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 25) I watched the second cycle of new Law and Order shows since Dick Wolf’s franchise returned to NBC following the delays caused by the writers’ and actors’ strikes. The first in the sequence was an episode of the flagship Law and Order show called “Human Intentions,” and it showed the murder of a high-tech entrepreneur called Evan Marks (Joey Mintz), who along with his partner James Sawyer (Gopal Divan) has built a PayPal-style app and have made themselves billions off it. I strongly suspect the writers were thinking of Elon Musk – not only did they give the character the same initials and the same business model (the real Musk co-founded PayPal and then sold it, making so much money he became “the richest man in the world,” and at least according to lazy reporting he’s remained so despite every business he’s been involved in that we know about losing money) but they made him a compulsive partier and drug user. Marks was withdrawing $2,000 from an ATM just before he was shot and killed to restock the party currently in progress with various illegal drugs. The cops first suspect Marks’s drug dealer, who’s also an aspiring rapper – he’s arrested in the middle of a recording session, and later he explains he’d got out of drug dealing except for servicing Marks, which he was willing to do because “studio time is so expensive.” The cops also have a witness who heard Marks arguing with another man over someone named Eva, and naturally they assume that was a woman Marks and the other guy were both interested in. They interview Marks’s widow, who tells them they had an open relationship and were free to have extra-relational activities.

Then they’re told by someone in the company that “Eva” was not a human female, but an artificial intelligence program developed at the company by lead technician Ben Stafford (Jacob A. Ware). “Eva” was so good at displacing the company’s human employees that Marks had just laid off half of them, including Ben Stafford, who found himself in the position of Victor Frankenstein: he had created a monster that ultimately destroyed his job. Eventually Stafford is arrested and indicted for Marks’s murder after he blurts out a confession in the police station, but the confession is later thrown out because Stafford had asked for Adderall, a drug he became addicted to because of the long hours Marks and Sawyer were making him work, and one of the detectives interrogating him had dropped a hint that he’d be given the drug if he confessed. Stafford has an excellent woman attorney who drops hints to the jury that James Sawyer may have murdered Marks to grab sole control of the company; he had an alibi for the night of the murder but he could easily have hired someone else to do it. Just as the prosecutors’ case seems on the rocks, Sawyer comes forward with a surveillance video from a camera neither the police nor the prosecutors had known about earlier, in which Stafford is seen ambushing Marks at the ATM, shooting him and then turning to the camera and helpfully showing his face. Only lead prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) is suspicious of the video and thinks it’s an AI “deep fake” because the Stafford figure is shown holding the gun in his right hand – and the real Stafford is left-handed. But his boss, District Attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, the only survivor from the original Law and Order cast – or at least the only one who’s still on the show today), orders him to use the video, and he does so and gets a guilty verdict despite his own doubts not only about the veracity of the video but the whole Promethean bargain of AI generally. The first half of this Law and Order treads in well-worn paths for this show, but the second half is fascinating in terms of what AI means long-term and whether we can still trust what we see and hear – especially in the wake of the deep-faked AI robocalls, allegedly from President Biden, that flooded into New Hampshire telling Democrats not to vote in the January 23 primary.