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AI is a big topic these days so I couldn’t help but curious about this show, if only because it has the word in the title. That said, the manga source material ran from 2015-2017 so the anime coming out now is more of a coincidence and it’s not going to talk about ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion. Maybe in the future we’ll see an anime revolve around those kinds of programs.
The Gene of AI takes place in a future where humans live alongside robotic “humanoids”. On the surface, humanoids are virtually indistinguishable from humans save for their pupils taking on the shape of a horizontal oval. Humanoids have the ability to digitally back up their personalities, though this practice has been made illegal. The show centers around Hikaru Sudo (Takeo Otsuka), a human doctor who runs a legitimate clinic to treat humanoids but also assists those in more legally grey situations if the price is right. In the first episode, he meets a family comprised of two humanoid parents and one human adopted daughter. The humanoid mother is suffering from a computer virus she caught after she and her husband created a backup of her personality one week earlier.
To this episode’s credit, it presents a very compelling and philosophical dilemma surrounding the guest characters. Hikaru concludes that the only treatment that will work is uploading the backup into the mother’s systems. However, despite guaranteeing her survival, the mother debates with her husband over the procedures. She worries that her current self will cease to exist and that she wouldn’t be the same person after she uses her backup. It’s a legitimate concern and one with no clear answer. The mother does go through with the procedure so that her husband and daughter still have some version of her in her life though she does make the last minute decision to delay it so that she live out of the rest of her current version’s life. That the backup is a week old seems very intentional to me. It may be a small gap in time but a lot can happen in a week and the mother would lose memories of her life after the procedure. This is most accentuated when the daughter enjoys her mother’s cooking and then has to come to terms when her mother doesn’t remember the modifications she made that day because her backup predates it. It’s only one memory but that alone shows why the mother was worried about going through with the procedure.
Since the premiere focuses on the guest characters, there isn’t much to say about Hikaru. At least in this episode, he largely serves the role of an observer and means for the episode to progress. There is one major tidbit surrounding Hikaru’s past. Apparently, he has a humanoid mother who agreed to create a backup of herself for some research in order to secure funding for treatment Hikaru needed. This decision ultimately got her sent to prison. In one scene, Hikaru’s mother asks him if he’s still trying to find her, implying that he’s looking for her backup. It makes you wonder what Hikaru wants to do if he manages to retrieve it and how he views the current version of his mother. At the very least, this backstory explains Hikaru’s reaction to the humanoid couple’s situation. He recognizes their mistake and their dilemma because he’s more or less been there himself.
I’m curious to learn more about Hikaru though I imagine that the show will follow an episodic structure with more scenarios involving guest characters. I’m okay with that if such scenarios happen to be as good and interesting as this one.
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OP: “No Frontier” by Aile The Shota
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ED: “Wasurenagusa” by GReeeeN
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Watch The Gene of AI on Crunchyroll
Xenodude Scribbles 