Leading into the Terminator Zero premiere panel at Anime NYC Saturday night, a bit of the show’s soundtrack started playing with that iconic Terminator “du-dum du-du-dum” beat. Just a couple of “du-dum du-du-dum” in, one audience member started clapping in rhythm, and soon everyone joined. After several rounds of clapping, the rhythm was lost, but it was nonetheless a moment of excitement for writer Mattson Tomlin, director Masashi Kudo, and production designer Haruka Watanabe (all attending Anime NYC for their first time) as they arrived on stage—as well as for Terminator Zero’s composers Michelle Birsky & Kevin Olken Henthorn, who later revealed themselves sitting amongst the audience.

Q: …Any thoughts on the current risk of an AI apocalypse?

Mattson Tomlin: I’m terrified of it. I think that there’s the killer robot version of it, but then I think there’s the more grounded, realistic version where all of our bank accounts get drained, our credit cards don’t work, the lights go off, the water stops working, and we are shown how instantly we all turn into animals. I think that’s a terrifying potential reality.

Artificial intelligence is developing so quickly. When I first started writing the show, it was in 2021, and AI’s been a thing as long as any of us here have been alive, but it still felt like science fiction. Today, here in 2024, it doesn’t. By now, when I am scrolling through my Instagram feed, I am really in this place of going, “Is the image that I’m looking at, are the people in the image that I’m looking at, are these real human beings?” It scares me because it was only a year ago that we were making fun of AI, saying “it can’t figure out how many fingers we have”, and that’s over.

Masashi Kudo: It’s up to us to figure out how to use AI.