By Michaela Gordoni
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA’s Tricia Helfer believes the show’s 20-year-old message about AI is relevant now more than ever.
“We did warn against AI while we were shooting it,” Helfer shared with Fox News Digital this week at the Beverly Hills Film Festival.
“It was 20 years ago, and I’ve recently re-watched it and went, ‘Oh my go**, it’s even more relevant now.’ So I think we just really need to be careful,” she explained. “It’s a slippery slope between using it to our advantage and having it maybe be able to control us a little bit.”
Helfer played a humanoid robot in BATTLESTAR, which tells the story of a battle between humans and robots.
Screen Rant writer Debopriyaa Dutta observes that BATTLESTAR was ahead of the competition when it came to predicting technology. TERMINATOR is more far-fetched in comparison.
AI is “not going away, so I think it’s something that we’re going to have to embrace,” the actress continued. “But I think one of the things BATTLESTAR GALACTICA did was warn about it. And that’s, I think, something that we need to make sure [is] that we have is regulations and an understanding of how quickly and how overwhelming this technology could become.”
Advancements in the tech are coming faster than many realize. Late actress Suzanne Somers, who died in 2023, had the idea for an AI robot version of herself to be made after she passed, according to her widower, Alan Hamel.
“I am working with Hollo, an AI company to create Suzanne AI. It’s very exciting to think about being able to interact with Suzanne’s twin,” Hamel told Fox News Digital in March.
The robot studied her TV appearances and her books to replicate Somers’ persona.
Hollo.AI CEO Rex Wong said, “The robot, which we did in collaboration with Realbotix, is the first of many AI versions of Suzanne, but AI Suzanne can also be accessible via call, chat and text. AI Suzanne highlights how we can extend a person’s legacy and bring it to the next generation, and one of the services we will be rolling out will be the ability to preserve one’s legacy for future generations or bring back a loved one.”
Themes like this were going to be further explored in a BATTLESTAR GALACTICA reboot of the show with Sam Esmail. The project, originally ordered by Peacock, stopped, and a new company is yet to pick it up.
Esmail previously spoke about BATTLESTAR and AI: “The world is changing way too fast for us. I mean, when we started working on it, I obviously was aware of AI, but now, four or five years later, it’s in the public consciousness and now that’s so influential in how we’re going to tell the story. The allegory piece is something that is crystallized in a different way, too.”
Related: TERMINATOR Warned Against AI in 1984: ‘You Didn’t Listen’
Esmail says themes need to go beyond robots taking over humanity, now that audiences are more familiar with AI.
“I think we have to match that with BATTLESTAR,” he said.
While the BATTLESTAR reboot may or may not happen, there have been a handful of other recent projects that explore the dynamic between robots and humans. Netflix’s CASSANDRA and THE ELECTRIC STATE are a couple that were released this year.
Read Next: ‘We Have To Fight It’: Kevin Sorbo Warns Against AI Use In Hollywood
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