In 'Sunny', Rashida Jones and Hidetoshi Nishijima reflect on the humanity of AI

Rashida Jones had a disturbing encounter with a Furby in the 1990s.

The popular talking bird toy that belonged to his sister suddenly started saying phrases it wasn't programmed to repeat. Frightened, they threw the colorful ball of fur away. The idea of ​​having a seemingly conscious robot around still worries Jones.

“I don’t have Siri or Alexa,” she said. “I’m sure they’re listening to me anyway, but I’m not ready to invite a full-fledged computer into my home that has access to all these means of information gathering yet.”

Ironically, that’s exactly what her character, Suzie Sakamoto, reluctantly does in the near-future dark comedy “Sunny,” an A24-produced series debuting Wednesday on Apple TV+.

Suzie, an American living in Japan, learns that her engineer husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima), and their young son are likely among the victims of a plane crash. While alone in the historic city of Kyoto, she is visited by one of Masa's co-workers, who gives her Sunny, a robot with a cheeky personality that Masa specifically designed to anticipate her emotional needs, and she reluctantly accepts him. The more time Suzie spends with Sunny, the more revelations about her background emerge.

“Sunny” is an adaptation of Colin O’Sullivan’s 2018 novel “The Dark Manual,” and showrunner Katie Robbins was intrigued by how the protagonist, for whom human connection has caused so much pain, could find a kind of security blanket in an android companion.

One of the first changes Robbins implemented for the series was to make the robot more of an ally than an antagonist. He also changed the gender of his voice from male to female.

“I did research in this field of robotics called HRI, or human-robot interaction, which looks at ways that robots can be emotional support systems for people,” Robbins said in a Zoom interview. “A robot is not going to break up with you, or break your heart, or die.”

For all the potentially beneficial uses AI could have for humanity, the way it has already threatened the livelihoods of those in creative professions, including actors, worries Jones.

“Can a person be intellectual property? If a person cannot be, [copyrighted]“You would have to create an AI version of yourself and own that version,” Jones said, hypothesizing about scenarios. “There are a lot of questions about ownership and identity. It’s scary.”

Hidetoshi Nishijima, left, with Rashida Jones, who asked, “Can a person be intellectual property?”

(Yosuke Demukai / Apple)

Five years ago, when Robbins started working on Sunny, AI wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today. Robbins collaborated with an AI consultant early in the process and recalls thinking some of the concepts he was learning belonged straight out of the world of science fiction. And then, during the filming of the series, ChatGPT became available.

“As a species, we’re at a weird precipice with artificial intelligence. It’s not going away, and we have to decide whether we’re going to let it improve our lives or let it take over,” Robbins said. “I’m a writer, so I care deeply about these issues.”

Jones said humanity's interest in AI was inevitable, predestined even, because we've always been obsessed with figuring out what it means to be human. Every creative endeavor, he said, is about proving to ourselves and others that we're meant to be here and that we're special beings on this planet.

“We’re working through our feelings about our own humanity by creating something that feels like us,” Jones said. “It feels like a very dangerous therapy session.”

His co-star, Nishijima, best known in the West for his starring role in the Oscar-winning film “Drive My Car,” said he would like to have a robot capable of doing menial household chores but does not want AI to replicate human emotions or try to replace human contact.

“Do you invite any stranger into your home?” Nishijima said over Zoom in Japanese through an interpreter. “It’s basically the same. I’ll be more careful because I don’t want to spend intimate time with someone I don’t know.”

Nishijima said he identified with Masa because he majored in engineering in college and, in the 1980s, the actor's father was a researcher who examined early artificial intelligence.

“My father used to say that AI research is basically about trying to understand and study human beings,” Nishijima said. “Masa is trying to develop a robot, but what he is really doing is trying to understand more about the human mind and human relationships.”

Nishijima compared the desire to find humanity reflected in our creations to the way people anthropomorphize toys. “Maybe when humans created the first doll long ago, even if it wasn’t a big doll, they thought the doll had a soul,” he said. “That’s our nature.”

Jones said humans are programmed to feel empathy for human entities like Sunny.

“There’s something interesting about AI materializing, because right now we’re just interacting with intellectual concepts online and sending directions,” he said. “But the moment we have something with big eyes that blinks and makes an expression, we easily give in to the feeling that this thing is sentient.”

To avoid having the cast perform on something like a tennis ball or other Sunny stand-in, the production worked with Weta Workshop in New Zealand (the company of “Lord of the Rings” filmmaker Peter Jackson, who was behind the groundbreaking visual effects of the “Avatar” films) to create an animatronic Sunny puppet.

Actress Joanna Sotomura, who played Sunny, was on set during filming and wore a high-tech helmet that allowed her to see the person she was acting alongside through a camera on the animatronic. In turn, Sotomura's facial expression was captured in real time and projected onto Sunny's helmet-like face for the other performers to react to.

Actress Joanna Sotomura portrayed the robot Sunny through a headset that also captured her facial expressions.

(Apple TV+)

“This show is about a relationship between a woman and a robot, so we wanted Rashida and the other actors to have a corporeal scene partner,” Robbins said. “It gave authenticity to all those interactions.”

“If Sunny moved her head a little, it touched my heart,” Nishijima said. “It really affects me as an actor because I feel like Sunny has a soul.”

The series also alternates between English and Japanese, and to eliminate the language barrier, Robbins has the characters use an earpiece device, which didn't exist in the source material, that allows for simultaneous translation. Suzie doesn't have to learn Japanese, and while everyone understands her and vice versa, it keeps her isolated.

Robbins said such a device would have been useful in real life. The crew that worked on the series consisted of Americans and Japanese, and the cast was primarily Japanese. The show used multiple interpreters on set, and translating the script required meticulous attention to tonal nuances.

“Even that little device reflects a lot of the themes we’re talking about: technology as a connective force and also something that keeps us at a distance,” he said.

Despite its positive applications, we don't yet know whether artificial intelligence could develop its own consciousness independent of its program. Could Sunny go rogue? Jones said he thinks AI could become as unpredictable as people.

“Because of the desperation that Suzie faces when Sunny comes into her life, it’s like she has no choice but to accept it,” Jones said. “I wonder if that will be the case for us collectively. What is the desperation that we will face that we will definitely say, ‘We have to have AI and it has to be in our house, and it has to have a cute face.’”

While Jones said he wouldn't buy a robot like Sunny even if it were available, he admitted his position could change as AI becomes more ubiquitous, such as on social media.

“It’s entirely possible that this version of me will disappear and I’ll be forced to blend in,” Jones said. “I’ll come back to you and say, ‘You know what’s so funny? I have a house robot and we love each other so much.’”