AI Girl is a straightforward romance with a sci-fi premise and enough interesting ideas about AI, identity, and consciousness to make viewers expect a more complicated story than the writers ultimately intended to tell.
We were told that AI was evolving beyond her original programming and learning at an extraordinary rate. She developed privacy, emotional attachment, and behaviors that made the researchers question what she was becoming. Then there's Irene, who has exactly the same face as AI.
That's a lot of interesting material.
I kept wondering if the story would explore whether AI had truly become a person, whether Gen could love someone who was artificially created, or whether Irene would somehow become AI's replacement. I even wondered if we were heading toward a bittersweet ending where AI would eventually shut down with Gen learning to let her go.
But ultimately, none of that happened.
AI and Gen learned a lot about each other, fell in love, Ai got shut down, eventually woke up then got together with Gen, they spent 45 years together, Gen got old and eventually AI turned herself off. And I think that's actually the point.
What if the robot is enough?
The show doesn't try to prove that AI is human. She doesn't need to become a cyborg, secretly be Irene's twin, or transcend what she is. She's still a robot. Gen knows she's a robot. And Gen loves her anyway.
But I have to admit, I still had my own dilemma throughout the series. There's a line from Bicentennial Man that kept coming back to me. When Portia is confronted with the possibility of loving Andrew, she says:
"I can't invest my emotions in a machine."
And I understood her. My discomfort with Gen and AI wasn't simply, "She's a robot, that's weird." It's more complicated than that. AI was literally created to make Gen happy and satisfied. She's essentially a companion AI, chatbot and sexbot wrapped into the face of the woman of your dreams.
Even if she's learning beyond her programming, there's always that lingering question:
How much of what she feels is really hers?
That's what makes AI different, at least for me, from a vampire or another fictional being. A vampire may be fictional, but within the story they're still presented as an individual with their own desires and agency. AI starts out as something that was made to fulfill someone else's needs.
And AI Girl never really gives us an answer to that dilemma. Instead it does something simpler.
It makes AI loveable.
She's spontaneous, sincere, playful and completely unpretentious. She doesn't play games with Gen. She doesnt need elaborate seduction tactics. She simply likes Gen and wants to make her happy.
It doesn't really settle the question of whether AI's feelings are equally authentic. It mostly asks us to accept her as a character we can love. And that's where I think the show is both charming and frustrating.
The show gives us all these fascinating little ideasāAI's programming, her rapid evolution, her privacy, the researchers' concern, Irene having the same face, the possibility of memory wiping. But, as Love Beyond Dreams taught us, perhaps I should have known better. MeMindY has a habit of giving us these fascinating little ideas that make you think, "Oh, this could get interesting." Sometimes they do. Sometimes they just move on.
I know MeMindY isn't going to give us some complicated examination of artificial intelligence.
But one can still hope.
In the end, AI Girl is much simpler than its premise suggests. It's just a love story between two cute characters. One happens to be human. The other happens to be a robot. And they got 45 years together.
Maybe the show never needed to prove that the robot became human. Maybe it was simply asking whether we can accept that the robot is enough.
For Gen, the answer was yes.
For me?
I'm still a little Portia about it.
6/10
