Anti Reset is an AI romance that is more romance and less AI.

The story is about Chu Yi Ping (Wu Ping Chen) who gets into an accident and injures himself. His uncle, who is the head of a lab where they are experimenting on highly human-like AI, sends him a prototype named Ever 9 (Huang Li Feng), who starts out as Yi Ping’s caretaker, but over time, they fall in love with each other.

They had the perfect set up to explore the philosophical set up of sentience; Yi Ping is a professor of History and Philosophy, so unlike characters in other settings, this would be something he could characteristically ponder upon. Are we moving too fast and too forward with technology if we make AI to completely substitute humans? If there is a robot that is wholly sentient, how would they be different from a human? If an AI is designed to serve the emotional needs of a human, even if his own feelings are explained as a bug that overrides the design, can the AI really be in control over his feelings?

None of these questions, and the hundreds more that can be asked with such a setting, are answered in the show. The episodes are too short and too few and the plot is too ambitious, it was bound to be rushed in places. It is, by and large, a domestic slice of life romance, where the AI subplot takes a backseat until it’s needed to present the major conflict in the penultimate episode.

I wasn’t expecting a deep dive into scientific mumbo-jumbo to explain literally every single facet of Ever 9’s artificial intelligence but I was expecting it to at least be a central plot point. Except for the last two episodes, where Ever 9’s potential reset is the looming problem they need to overcome, him being AI is actually not very relevant to the plot. If they stripped away everything to do with Artificial Intelligence, and made Ever 9 into a regular human, a caretaker who had been hired by Yi Ping’s uncle instead of developed in his lab, it would not make much difference to the plot. At the end of the day, the show is more akin to the trope of a forbidden romance with class differences, than a show that deals with the idea of sentience. If Ever 9 eats, has a heartbeat, has a full command over the complexity of human emotions, what exactly makes him ‘artificial’ save for the circumstances of his creation? He’s so technologically advanced that there’s virtually no difference between his emotional intelligence and that of a human’s, which is exactly where the show loses a few points for me.

“Anti Reset” is not great at what it’s supposed to be, a complicated and forbidden romance between a human and an AI who is designed to serve him, but it is good in the scenes where it is just Yi Ping and Ever 9 blooming as a young couple. They are very cute, I’ll give them that. Almost so much that at one point, when the AI subplot became secondary to the development of their relationship, I almost didn’t mind it.

What it set out to do and what it ended up achieving are two very different things. Though the romance is worth a watch, a philosophical exploring of the setting would have elevated the show.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5

Streaming on- GagaOOLala/Viki