Last year when Betty Gilpin was filming Mrs. Davis, the Peacock dramedy about a nun who vows to destroy a powerful artificial intelligence, people were barely even talking about ChatGPT — it was, as Gilpin described, “niche.” Now, as audiences binge the show, it’s the topic on everyone’s mind. “As a parent in real life, I think a lot about our dependence on the internet, and I do think it’s natural for humans to want a workaround to risk,” she says. “But it’s also tampering with the things that make us human.”

In the series, Gilpin plays Sister Simone, who, while attempting to enact her revenge on the bot known as Mrs. Davis, gets caught up in ancient religious conspiracies (she is, essentially, searching for a riff on the Holy Grail). The actress has thought a lot about the consequences of a more technologically advanced world and where her own values line up against her character’s. “I think AI wants to go after things that are easy to monetize and wants us to put blinders on and only go after our individual goals,” she said. “If we take those blinders off, we’d realize, oh, we forgot to fix global warming and to build a democratic society where everyone is living peacefully. [Instead], there’s billionaires on yachts.”

Gilpin was joined by series director and EP Owen Harris to discuss their show as part of a THR Presents panel, powered by Vision Media. Harris, who previously worked on Black Mirror, described Davis — which was created by Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof — as a love child of the pandemic. “We were all feeling particularly lost and were looking for answers about what was going on in the world,” he says. “[Damon and Tara] were talking about, wouldn’t it be great to be able to press a button and have this all-seeing eye show us the way?”