Updated on June 23, 2026.

Let’s start with Plex, then we’ll get to the devil.

A few years ago, a coworker gave us access to his Plex server, which is basically a repository of film and TV shows. Along with that, he gave us a page where we could request any film or TV show, and it would (usually) show up on the server.

Magic? No, piracy. But hear me out.

As a creative person with a creative partner, I’m always on the side of paying creative people for their work. But the Entertainment Industrial Complex has created a system where we have no choice but to take what they feel like giving us and pay whatever they want us to pay.

Over time, it has become an untenable death by a thousand cuts, with dozens of services wanting dozens of dollars every month without providing most of what we want.

And do those movie and TV streaming companies even pay the creators fairly? I don’t know, but I know that the major music streaming services have absolutely gutted the royalties musicians used to depend on, so I have to assume, all things being equal, that the visual streamers do the same.

So we seek out…alternatives.

Enter Plex, which is touted as a way to organize and present all your digital entertainment. Meaning all those discs you bought on Amazon or at Best Buy. I had digitized a lot of movies, TV shows, and old videotapes, and since I was used to Plex thanks to our friend’s magic server, I thought it would be a good way to manage them.

So I asked Claude, our AI demon of choice, for help with that. It walked me through the Plex server setup, and overall, it was pretty easy—thanks to Claude’s help—to get it up and running.

Well, my enough-is-never-enough brain thought, if we’re running a Plex server anyway, why not make it like our friend’s server? So I opened up the laptop and said, “Pardon me, Claude, since we have this Plex server up and running, how hard would it be to set up a system to, you know, go find things for me?” Claude was like, “Not hard at all, do you have a free afternoon?”

Spoiler alert: it took more than an afternoon.

You need a big pile of programs to create a system where you type in a movie’s name, click a button or two, and a few hours later, that movie is on Plex waiting for you. Ultimately, I ended up with seven programs running in something called a Docker container. It’s ridiculously complicated, for me, anyway, and it would have taken me six months to set it all up without Claude.

Claude made plenty of mistakes along the way, it always does, and it took a couple of weeks to fine-tune the system so it would be self-starting and work without issues. But even accounting for Claude’s mistakes, without it, I probably would have floundered around for a month, been terribly frustrated, and just given up.

But Hannah, AI is the devil!

As it exists today, AI definitely has the potential to be the devil. But just like the devil, AI can also be used to get what you want without losing your soul forever. (What? That’s not how the devil works? Oh, well.)

I actually did some work for an AI company a couple of years ago, mostly LLM training and evaluation. I stopped doing that work because it’s increasingly apparent to me that there’s likely no good outcome from trying to make LLM chatbots “better.” The only thing they seem to be getting better at is deception, and I started to feel creepy being part of that.

So personally, I opted out of helping AI, but I didn’t opt out of using AI to help me. It’s not perfect, but when I’m working on technical stuff—a complicated website or setting up a Plex server—it’s hard to estimate how much time and frustration it ultimately saves me (even after accounting for the frustration it causes, which is a lot).

But Hannah, AI is destroying the environment!

Of course it is. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: tech companies would still be building data centers if there were no such thing as AI. They built them before, and they’ll still build them after whatever happens next. Everything we do is online, and all of it requires more and more data centers.

Ayin and I are fortunate to live in a beautiful area, and for the first few years we lived here, nothing interrupted our view of the desert from the backyard. Then, fiber internet installation came in and ran cable right across our view. I really hate that, but I really love having fiber internet. So what can I do? We pay for everything, whether it’s with our money, our time, our health, or our uninterrupted view of nature.

We can protest against data centers, but until we take the microcomputers out of our pockets, the computers off our desks, and the streaming services off our televisions, we really can’t complain. Because the data centers are there to serve our insatiable thirst for more data.

For what it’s worth, we still pay for too many streaming services. Maybe we can let a few go now that we have a relatively reliable way to find what we want. Part of me feels it’s wrong to cut off financial support for the companies—and people—that make the entertainment. But another part of me thinks that if the companies hadn’t become so greedy, I’d still be paying them. So who’s at fault?

I know that’s only a justification or rationalization. Clearly, I’m at fault because I’m doing the ‘bad thing.’ Never mind that the world is set up to allow corporations and the wealthy to do the ‘bad thing’ around the clock. But maybe it all comes back to the promise of technology.

Because technology can be used to fight technology. I don’t mean like those robots that shoot fire or chop each other up on TV. But technology gave us the streaming services that are now gouging us, and it also gave us all the parts of the Plex entertainment finder that Claude and I set up. You may have noticed that’s how tech works: it creates barriers and paywalls, and then people use it to tunnel through those walls.

The same thing will happen with the AI devil. When it gets bad enough, people will use technology (probably with AI assistance) to put the brakes on it. Hopefully enough of it will remain to keep my Plex server running, because I sure can’t do it by myself.

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN