Review: THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST

 by Rob DiCristino

The end is extremely f*cking nigh.

What is artificial intelligence? No, like, literally. What is it? That’s the first question that filmmaker Daniel Roher poses to each of his interview subjects in The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. The lineup is extensive: OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Anthropic presidents Daniela and Dario Amodei. Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris. Game theorist Liv Boeree. Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari. Turing Award-winning computer scientist Yoshua Bengio. I’ll admit that I don’t know who most of these people are — except Harari; I read and almost understood Sapiens — but Roher and co-director Charlie Tyrell assure us that they’re on the cutting edge of AI research and development. These are the people driving the future, the ones deciding what this latest evolution in our society is actually going to look like. Will AI automate jobs? Streamline education? Will it cure diseases? Revolutionize military strategy? Will there be human rights abuses? Corporate malfeasance? Will the Terminators be assassins or father figures?

Spoilers: None of these experts seems to know for sure. That’s okay, really, because while it may be advertised as an incisive investigation into the roots, functions, and endgame of our new artificially-intelligent society, The AI Doc is mostly about an expectant father having a full-on — and very reasonable — panic attack. With his wife (fellow filmmaker Caroline Lindy) set to give birth to their first child, Roher demands some measure of reassurance from these masters of the universe: Is he bringing his child into a world with a future? If so, what will it look like? Will his child have a place in it? What about any others who might come after them? Better yet, would any of these experts have children of their own right now? As you might expect, the answers vary: Most of the talking heads — which further include the likes of Google AI co-founder Demis Hassabis, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Empire of AI author Karen Hao, and XPRIZE chairman Peter Diamandis — are at odds. Some believe in a shiny utopia of automated pleasures. Others, well. Much less so.

So as you might expect, Roher’s narration — which is animated in a charming stop-motion style that offers the whole enterprise a bit of homemade texture — oscillates wildly between cautious optimism and existential catastrophe. Each new bit of data sends him cascading from one perspective to the other: He’s encouraged by anecdotes about breakthroughs in medical research in one moment before recoiling in horror at reports of ChatGPT-fueled teenage suicide in the next. AI champions like Diamandis boast it as the most revolutionary innovation in human history, while journalists like Hao — who stand to make far less money from this level of enthusiasm — are not as convinced. Home footage of Lindy’s pregnancy punctuates the immediacy of Roher’s search for philosophical grounding, but none of these eminent figures seems able to provide the cocktail of positive vibes and empirical data that can answer all of his questions. Appearances from top dogs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are teased but never come to fruition.

What’s left over might be most generously described as a layman’s introduction to artificial intelligence couched in a pleasant story about incoming parenthood. Like most of us, Roher ultimately has no idea what to make of AI: He appreciates its potential benefits and worries about its more dangerous implications. That’s all very fine and dandy, I suppose, but as The AI Doc scrambles for a definitive thesis, it becomes alarmingly clear to us that it won’t be providing any genuine insight. There’s a baffling naivety to its “Kumbaya,” “Write your congressperson,” “Let’s just all trust in the benevolence of society” closing argument, an ideological shrug of the shoulders that they actually have the gall to let Lindy lampshade just seconds before it’s executed in earnest. It’s not that Roher’s personal conclusion is necessarily flawed — I mean, there’s really very little any of us can actually do to get off a train that’s already well in motion — but his insistence on “apocaloptimism” never comes close to feeling earned. In short: The AI Doc will teach you absolutely nothing new about AI.

In the end, the question is this: How can those of us watching The AI Doc forestall the inevitable rise of artificial intelligence? The film’s not-so-subtle answer? Nothing. We can’t do anything about it. It’s here. It’s already over. We lost this race before we even knew we were running it. My students trust Google’s AI Overview results more than they trust me. My grandmother tells ChatGPT intimate details of her everyday life that she would never entrust to blood relatives. Hell, even I can’t pretend I never use it: Grammarly copy edited this review! And not even all that well! That’s really bad news for a system the government is using for, you know, missile defense! You know what we can do, though? Watch movies. Watch Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Watch Ex Machina or Short Circuit. Oh! Watch Alphaville. That’s a weird one. Read a little Phillip K. Dick. Kurt Vonnegut. Ask Adam Riske to recommend a good Twilight Zone episode. Finally set aside the time to get into Westworld. Our so-called “imagineers” are looking out for themselves. We’re on our own.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist hits select U.S. theaters on Friday, March 27th.