AI is everywhere, but especially on TV

Boston Globe

09-05-2025

The portrayals can be violently and appropriately ambivalent. Netflix's future-shock anthology '
"Sunny" on Apple TV+.
Apple TV+
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Which brings us back to 'Murderbot.' Played by
Murderbot has hacked itself so that it is no longer required to follow human orders. But damned if it doesn't keep caring about their well-being anyway. It also finds itself acting and thinking a little less machine-like. 'I felt like a balloon floating above myself, filled with agony,' it muses after taking a beating from a less benign and more advanced Security Unit. That's deep, Murderbot.
Such notes of humanity are what give AI stories their moral and philosophical tension, especially when the idea of mortality enters the picture. The replicants of 'Blade Runner' (1982, based on Philip K. Dick's novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?') are dangerous, but only because they've learned that they have an expiration date and have decided they're not going out like that. Same with HAL 9000, the rogue mainframe from '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) that goes homicidal only when, through an inspired bit of lip-reading, it realizes its days are numbered.
The current AI panic/promise has elicited any number of reflexive jokes about Skynet, the AI system responsible for the apocalypse in the 'Terminator' franchise. But even those mean machines gave us the here-to-help Terminator of 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day' (1991), played by the face of terror from the first movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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This sympathy for the AI devil is a defining trait of the current AI TV spate. Yes, the technology can be scary, and you should trust it at your own risk. But it's the humans you should really be wary of: the people pulling the strings at sprawling corporations, or showing a willingness, even eagerness, to shed some blood in pursuit of profits. AI might be the instrument of such conspiracies, but it doesn't create them.
In the crushingly comical season 7 premiere of 'Black Mirror,' a woman with brain cancer (Rashida Jones again) gets a new lease on life through a cutting-edge AI procedure. But the service comes with expensive coverage tiers, and if she doesn't splurge with money she and her husband (Chris O'Dowd) don't really have, she unconsciously spouts ad copy at very awkward moments. AI isn't the real culprit here. Greed is.
'Black Mirror,' for all of its much-discussed technological twists, is ultimately about the same thing as 'Murderbot': what it means to be human. To want to binge TV shows when your annoying clients need you. To wonder what life requires of you, and how much juice you can squeeze out of it before it's your time to shuffle off this mortal coil. Looking at its clients, with their insecurities and wobbly romances and petty grievances, Murderbot can only shake its cybernetic head.
And yet, despite its better judgment, it wants to be a part of it all. Of course it does. AI might provide shortcuts to creativity, but 'Murderbot' still springs from the human imagination (series creators Chris and Paul Weitz, working from novellas by Martha Wells) and explores human desires — along with the desire to be human. These are subjects AI isn't ready to tackle on its own. At least not yet.
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In suggesting that humanity, for all its flaws, is kind of cool, the series might also be making a plug for good old-fashioned storytelling — the kind you can't get from, say, ChatGPT. Murderbot comes to realize that it, like TV, really needs that human touch.