This week on Gene of AI we’re back to vignettes around characters we’ve (mostly) never seen before and will probably (mostly) never see again, wherein Doctor Sudo gets just a couple of lines. This time, we’re dealing with censorship and society.
The first Vignette deals with an angry parent and a violent anime with what appears to be a villain protagonist. Disliking the impact the show (supposedly marketed to that age demographic I guess, despite looking and feeling more like a teen offering) is having on his little kids, a man spearheads an effort to get it cleaned up or taken off air, confronting the Humanoid creator (it’s a one-man show, presumably thanks to automated tools for support) about the topic.
The creator doesn’t take great care of himself, and in fact is Sudo’s patient in part thanks to collapsing from self-inflicted overwork, but has a very strong stance about making the kind of show that he wants to make. In a later dialogue, the creator and parent run afoul of some youthful thugs. The parent is initially unable to handle the very concept of violent or criminal behavior happening, but the creator fights them off more or less on his annoying acquaintance’s behalf and declines to press charges despite being stabbed in the process, talking more about the stories he likes to tell and how making things safe and sanitary robs them of humanity.
In the end, the parent hears more about the show from his kids, who affirm that the best part is that the main character (despite looking and sounding like a heartless eccentric villain) occassionally does good things, and we get a scene suggesting that this is more the offspring of A Certain Scientific Acclerator than… another show I reviewed recently.
Which for my part, I’m glad to be in a time and a world where even the shows I’ve hated most for their content, absolutely despised through and through, are things that are allowed to exist.
In the second, a Humanoid becomes a teacher, and takes a job at a school where the administration touts how everything is handled with a “human touch” – no robots or AI in the classroom. The lessons are even streamed to the concerned parents who want their little darlings learning from real humans.
However, the school is far from being sunshine and roses. In seeking to appease the parents, they have draconian rules that essentially prevent the teachers from acting even remotely as humans. They can’t bond with or take care of any particular student because the someone else’s little darling wouldn’t be the main character. Ironically, the script that the teachers there must run according to in order to avoid a dressing down is far more robotic and heartless than anything an AI would produce. The fakery is even highlighted in an exercise where the students form a human pyramid in augmented reality rather than real reality, and the administrator touts how the parents are always happy with the performance of basically nothing being done because in the AR view, it’s always their child on the top of the pyramid.
Eventually, beaten down by mistreatment from above and a lack of ability to treat the kids as they deserve (cited heavily for getting juice for a club where a student won an award), the teacher quits on Doctor Sudo’s advice. He later gets a job in a more normal future school as an assistant teacher, working alongside Perm-kun (from an earlier episode) in an environment that, using modern and artificial tools or no, seems to have a lot more heart.
The ideas in this episode seems to skew even harder to social rather than gadget sci-fi than normal. In fact, in the anime vignette, there’s basically nothing that strictly needs future tech. The idea there, the basic “censorship is not a good thing” message, is done to death but also one that seems like it will never not be needed.
The second does rely somewhat on the technology, but is more about resisting or embracing change, or perhaps real versus artificial connections. It recalls the customer service vignette from some episodes back with the same sort of gist that “people claim they want humanity when really they want a very specific artificiality”, and in showing how dignity can be trampled in the pursuit of some ideal of perfection.
On the whole, I think this is oddly both one of the stronger episodes and one of the weaker. The vignettes are nicely contained and quite resonant… but also have less to do with the world of Gene of AI than they could or possibly should. It doesn’t feel like it had to come out of this show, with its biggest concept being the Humanoids, and could have been addressed in almost any modern or near-future sort of setting. But that doesn’t make the material any weaker, I suppose, and it is doing what Gene of AI does best.