It’s a Nun vs. AI in ‘Mrs. Davis’ | Wall Street Journal (26 March, 2023)


Image Credit: Sophie Kohler/Peacock

In the new Peacock series “Mrs. Davis”, we are presented with Simone, a nun who sets out to find the Christian Holy Grail and destroy a global order with an omnipresent, creepily benevolent AI algorithm called Mrs. Davis reigning supreme.

“Arriving as AI infiltrates all corners of real life, the show takes an often zany, genre-flipping approach to some weighty issues looming. What sort of relationship do we really want with our bots? Could God compete with a virtual assistant that has answers to our deeper questions? ,” John Jurgensen writes for the Wall Street Journal.

Jurgensen sat down with the creators of the show, Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez, to talk about their genre-defying work.

“We’re in this clumsy exploration of the technology. “The officiant at our wedding was an AI!” But I think within a decade we’ll be affixing a level of real personhood to AI without designating it as artificial. Where people are just having relationships with AIs, like Scarlett Johansson’s character in “Her.” The reason I believe this is because people already form deep emotional relationships with fictional characters—that’s what Tara and I do for a living,” Lindelof says about AI as emerging technology.

Read the full interview below.

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