As an actor and writer, Rashida Jones has spent a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence. The use of AI was a major issue at the negotiating table during last year’s Hollywood strikes. AI is also central to her new series ‘Sunny’ for Apple TV+.
“My feeling today – because it changes every day – is that it is here and there is no turning back. There is an inevitability that we have to accept,” Jones said. “We need some kind of collective ethical parameters on how we use this, because it’s quite scary. At this point we have no control over it.”
In “Sunny,” Jones plays Suzie, an expat in Japan whose husband Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima of “Drive My Car”) and son Zen go missing after a plane crash. She receives a companion robot named Sunny as a condolence gift from Masa’s employer is shocked to discover that Masa worked in robotics and had programmed Sunny specifically with her in mind. She thought he worked in refrigeration. With Sunny by her side, Suzie begins to investigate who Masa really was, compared to who she thought he was. As she delves further into the mystery, Suzie discovers that the code for creating robots like Sunny could be dangerous in the wrong hands .
Katie Robbins adapted the series for TV from the novel “The Dark Manual” by Colin O’Sullivan. She says that while the series is optimistic because of the bond Suzie feels with Sunny, it is also a cautionary tale.
“What AI does on this show is help people who turn inward and have trouble connecting with others. It’s beautiful,” Robbins said. “But because it is man-made, there is also enormous potential for it to be misused and used in dangerous ways.”
The speed at which AI was developing in the real world when Robbins wrote the series came as a surprise.
“When I first wrote the show, I was working with an AI consultant and a roboticist and they were talking about this being on the horizon. And I thought, ‘You’re crazy. This show is science fiction. This is never going to happen.’ And they said, ‘Be careful.’ And as we were filming, ChatGPT came out, and as a writer I’m incredibly concerned about the capacity of generative AI.”
In Jones’ scenes, Sunny was a less advanced robot in need of human assistance. Actor Joanna Sotomura was in a nearby tent, voicing Sunny’s lines and making facial expressions that the robot would mimic. “That actually gave me a little bit of relief because I thought, ‘Oh, we’re nowhere near this being an integrated part of our lives,’” Jones joked. “There was a lot of effort, both within production and in post-production, to make her feel like this very functioning thing.”
Would Jones want to own a robot in real life?
‘To comfort me emotionally? No. To fold clothes and do the dishes? Yes, very bad,” she joked.
