Not really a review, just felt I had to do a short writeup of how I felt about the show. Wait, that sounds an awful lot like a review?
I preface all this by saying I enjoyed Chobits, I think it's a really neat show, and I really liked the great music such as the random banger they dropped in episode 17 (DVD) when they were cleaning the flats. The thing that is bugging me is that I wish I had watched Chobits just a few years earlier, before all this AI craziness going on. Chobits focuses on the relationships between humans and 'persocoms' which are androids that some humans find themselves in romantic and sexual relationships with.
It's usually obvious that in any romance the main characters end up together at the end, but I felt myself almost hoping that this wouldn't be the case in Chobits. I know I must sound evil, but I struggled to see Chi as a living being with its own agency. Like the AI which has emerged in real life, Chi is a computer that emulates being human but is not. I have no doubt that had I seen this show say, five years ago, I wouldn't have questioned Chi's 'humanity', but the speed at which AI surrounds me in my day-to-day life has created paranoia and an unwavering shield in my mind that kicked in while watching Chobits. The show does, of course, examine both the positives and negatives of human-AI relationships, and I think that perhaps some of my discomfort comes from the fact that Chobits is not that far-off from reality despite being created as a work of fiction. The show depicts a marriage break down because of the husband neglecting his wife in favour of a persocom, and while I've yet to read about a case of this happening in the real world just yet, there was a case of a boy's suicide to 'join' his AI companion; a far more disastrous consequence.
Chobits also explores something which I have yet to see in reality, which is a character feeling inferior to persocoms. While there is no doubt that there is a push for AI to take human jobs, humans do not feel inferior to AI at simply being human. For a time, we ridiculed image-generating AI for its inability to create accurate hands, for example. This brings me to another point, do we, or perhaps just I, fear AI because of its 'uncanny valley' nature? AI currently exists without a face, but if it communicated with us through an almost visually indistinguishable replica of a human body like the persocoms of Chobits, would we be more at ease? Would we treat them as family and friends as in Chobits?
I'll lay down some things that I'd be curious to see an android, programmed to be as human-like as possible try and 'share' with humans. Ageing, physically that is, they would grow old internally (as tragically depicted in Chobits) but not share our concerns about our hair going grey, wrinkles etc. Can they see retirement as a goal? I'm going on a bit of a tangent here...
I think what I'm trying to say about the persocoms and Chi especially is that they are very much 'artificial' and for me I can't get around this fact when I think about their intent. Chi may love Hideki, but is this not because a code was written to tell her to feel that way under the right circumstances, in an effort to emulate a human?
11/05/2025