The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Gene of AI

Hikaru Sudo is a human doctor who specializes in treating humanoids who come to him with various problems and worries. Although humanoids suffer from “diseases” like humans, there are “treatment” options available only to them. In a world where humans, humanoids, and robots live alongside one another in daily life, the protagonist is a human doctor who treats humanoids.

The Gene of AI is based on Kyūri Yamada's AI no Idenshi manga. It streams on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

It's a wonder how refreshing it can be to sit through a premiere that doesn't feel ripped from the pages of a light novel. Sure, The Gene of AI also has its timely subject matter and near-future sci-fi setting going for it. Still, I was just happy that this episode didn't feel the need to drown out its story in overlong introductory monologues and montages crammed full of lazy exposition. Instead, we get actual scenes, where the dialogue, mise en scene, and natural flow of the plot do the heavy lifting. Sure, some of that dialogue struggles with your more traditionally creaky exposition, where characters explain things about their world in a way that benefits the audience more than themselves, and there's still quite a bit of expository narration from the good doctor Hikaru, but still. What I appreciated the most about The Gene of AI was that it felt like genuine television, even if we're still in the territory of soapy, melodramatic television.

I also appreciated that the show deals with some interesting issues using its humanoid characters and their unique struggles, such as the conflict of whether or not to pursue making an illegal backup of one's personality in the face of some manner of mortal illness or defect. The script deals with these issues with all of the subtlety of a ball-peen hammer knocking over a Jenga tower, but I still want to give the show credit for at least trying to take its rather outlandish premise seriously. I'm still not sure why these humanoids exist as they do since you'd think we'd need a couple more centuries' worth of progress before we transition from crappy AI chatbots to fully-fledged individual citizens that have families and seem fully integrated within society. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief if the series can continue to explore these sci-fi themes and develop its characters, however.

My main gripe with Gene of AI is that it simply isn't much to look at or listen to. Its production values are never outright ugly or distracting, but there's a blandness to the direction and a flatness to the artwork that makes this world feel lifeless in a way that I do not think is intentional. It's not enough to kill my interest in the show—I'm willing to give it a couple of more episodes, at least—but in a summer that is so lacking in standout premieres, I'm looking for shows that pop, and The Gene of AI seems more content to remain at a gentle simmer.

I wish this show looked even a little bit better. The animation for this premiere is, at its best, barely functional. It can show its characters walk, stand, or talk, but that's about it. Everything else is beyond its grasp, whether it's characters believably emoting or any kind of cinematography to complement the script. The lighting is flat, the direction is passionless, and the character acting is borderline non-existent. It has the aesthetic of a daytime soap opera with actors who have all had their facial muscles numbed, and it sucks so much life out of what is otherwise a seriously intriguing bit of science fiction.

The idea of AI – actual AI, not the text calculators and image diffusion programs currently being peddled by digital snake oil salesmen in real life – has long been the topic of speculative fiction, and this show has a pretty interesting take on it. A certain level of existential discomfort comes with the idea of fully digital intelligence, not just in the “crazy robot” vein but in what it says about our understanding of what a “Person” is. That idea is at the root of the opening story here, and it's a fascinating one with a mortifying conclusion, where a little girl suddenly has to contend with seeing her mother die, only to be resurrected as an identical personality that is, fundamentally, not the same person. There's a ton of interesting world-building, like the existence of a copied black market AI that is sold to carry out terrorism. Altogether it's a unique, discomfiting setting for what is presumably a series of AI-focused dramas, and if I were reading this as a script, I'd probably love it.

Unfortunately, the animation cannot support the story it's telling or the emotions it's trying to express. It's practically comical when characters cry, and there's a lot of crying in this episode. When they express anything non-verbally, it becomes a Rorschach test where you try to intuit the emotion they're trying theoretically to convey. I have no idea if Dr. Sudo is supposed to be a stone-faced cipher on purpose or if it's just an accident of the animation. There are, admittedly, a few times where the flat delivery allows for some mildly funny jokes, such as Sudo's self-driving car telling him it'll void his insurance policy if he tries to drive, but that's the small payoff for the rest of the show lacking any real direction.

If anything, the show is lucky this is such a weak season that having a decent story is enough to keep it around. It's still depressing to see something with a lot of potential get smothered under lackluster animation. I'll stick with it for now, but I'll probably spend a lot of that time hoping for someone to license the manga while I watch it.

When it comes to sci-fi stories about Artificial Intelligence, they tend to focus on the emergence of said technology and/or the unintended consequence of said technology—i.e., your standard apocalyptic AI uprising. The Gene of AI features a world where AI's integration into society has been largely positive. In fact, androids that are visually identical to humans save for their eyes, make up 10% of the population and enjoy the full array of human rights. Human/AI couples are even an accepted part of society. Of course, even in such a world, there are numerous issues—and it is those this anime focuses on.

While the androids in this series have the same appearance and emotions as any human, their mechanical nature means that they can technically have their personality and memories backed up at any time. Society, however, has decided that this is a crime—and this episode is about introducing us to why this is through Hikaru, a doctor who secretly works in the AI black market.

His first case is about a husband who decided to back up his AI wife. However, the process left his wife with a virus that is slowly killing her. While the backup can be used to restore her, doing so will delete several weeks of memories.

This presents several philosophical questions. Will the original personality “die”? Is the backup the same person as the original? Do androids have a soul—and, if so, will the copy retain it?

We see bits of the wife dealing with these dilemmas and eventually refusing to have the backup restored until after the current her has died naturally from the virus—out of legitimate fear of death as much as anything else. But then, even when the backup is restored, her family lies to her and pretends she was in a coma to save her from dealing with all the ethical and philosophical questions that come with being a backup instead of the original.

Of course, just because the wife doesn't remember doesn't mean that her husband and daughter don't. The husband is just happy to have his wife back—he sees the loss of a few memories as nothing major as long as she's okay. The daughter, however, has to deal with a month of memories—a month of growth in their mother/daughter relationship—that, to her mother, never happened. In a real sense, her mother has died and now she's living with a person who looks and acts like her but isn't quite the same. When you think about how easily that could mess up a kid, it's not hard to understand why backups are illegal.

All in all, The Gene of AI is the kind of high-concept sci-fi anime I'm always up for. The world is well-built, the characters engaging, and the ethical/philosophical dilemmas both complex and well thought. I'll definitely be back for more next week.

After spending over a week being force-fed the trope-est anime bull-poop like a magical high school goose being fattened up for foie gras to be served to the reincarnation of the class idol, my critical sensibilities have started to feel… numb. A vending machine isekai protagonist? Sure, why not? Blatantly aping Harry Potter but with a samurai girl? Eh, as long as it's not mean-spirited. Repeating the plot beats of a beloved villainess comedy but taking them seriously? It looks pretty nice, so sure!

So when I watched the first episode of The Gene of AI and it didn't fit into any of these anime-specific microgenres, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I knew I liked it, but after a mind-numbing week, how could I write about it without comparing it to other iterations of basically the same plot? The animation doesn't have any glow filter over it to disguise any flat or stiff moments. It didn't even ask the same hackneyed questions as all other series dealing with future technology do, like, “Can artificially intelligent beings really think and feel?” or “If you make a copy of a consciousness, what happens to the one that gets killed/deleted?”

No, The Gene of AI doesn't waste time plodding over such well-trodden ground. Of course, the humanoids are sentient beings with well-developed emotions and there are laws to prevent their consciousnesses from being transferred, so the question isn't worth asking. The first episode, which is well-paced and self-contained, instead uses these concepts to tell a very human story about how our memories make us who we are, and rolling ourselves back even a couple of weeks can be uncanny to those around us. The family Sudo attends to is a typical nuclear family, except that it's two humanoids parenting a human daughter, but still, I felt invested in them and their relationships with one another by the end. The approach to technology feels subdued as well – a perfectly logical extension of the current state of things. Considering the battle for right-to-repair and the legal arguments the company Tesla has made to try to absolve themselves of responsibility when their self-driving cars kill people, it's no surprise that Shido trying to drive his car would void his auto insurance. If it's a dystopia, it's a subtle one.

The episode's greatest failing is its animation. It's not great – the environments are sterile and passionless, in a way that doesn't feel intentional. Although it's better composited than certain other series I could mention, the characters are hand-drawn beings moving through a world modeled in three dimensions. A shot of two characters sitting in front of a vast expanse of water was especially obtrusive. Still, I'll take that flatness over the glowy filter that the great majority of anime this season have applied to disguise their lackluster animation.

The Gene of AI was a true surprise, a series I knew nothing about and expected nothing of, coming right out of the gate with thoughtfully-written science fiction that is neither overly pessimistic nor blindly optimistic. I'll be fascinated to see how it develops further.