Nate At The Movies

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

As I’ve expanded my film history knowledge, I’ve learned that there was a bygone time when theatrical releases for documentaries were commonplace. What happened? I mean, I know what happened, but we should get back to that. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist may be as good a place as any to start, given its subject, and I think this one gave Morgan and I more existential dread than hope about the direction the AI revolution is moving.

The AI Doc regularly alternated between conventional and envelope-pushing, both in its investigative journalism and its filmmaking style. The sheer number of talking heads that this doc attracted was impressive, and none of their contributions felt hollow or superfluous, either. Did some of them seem too hopeless as they proclaimed “the end is near”? For sure. Did some of them seem too delusional as they praised the potential of AI? Yeah. But on the whole, their varying perspectives were pretty helpful in painting a picture of the current AI landscape.

I had high hopes for the interviews with the three CEOs of the big AI companies, especially Sam Altman, but I felt like Daniel Roher let him off a little easy in their interview. I wanted Altman to take accountability and produce some real solutions (or at least some hope), but Roher got lost in the sentimentality once Altman mentioned he and his wife were also expecting. I simultaneously appreciated and hated Dario Amodei’s candid cluelessness about the future of AI and its destructive potential, likely because his perspective was the closest to how I feel about it all. There were futures depicted in this film that scared me, but I’m also probably going to chat with Claude sometime in the next few days. Those billionaire CEOs want me to believe that that’s the problem, but I know better.

Strictly from a filmmaking perspective, I enjoyed the back and forth between the interviews and the creative stop-motion and animated segments. They kept the doc lively and interesting, and injected the movie with a hope and optimism that the rest of the film had trouble procuring. Roher did his best with his interview subjects trying to squeeze some optimism out of them, but that appeared to be tricky. I appreciate his efforts there, though. There was even some humor sprinkled into the doc, between Roher and his wife mostly, but those human elements made this an easier watch on the brain and the heart.

There was a real air of hopelessness surrounding The AI Doc—it’s so much easier to see those dim realities coming to fruition given who’s in charge of the path we go down with artificial intelligence. There’s a point in the AI food chain where the power one stands to gain trumps any potential good they could achieve by fighting against the current. I don’t think there are many people with enough power to stem the tide that are willing to, because why would they? As long as their pockets are lined, the rest of us are irrelevant. AI’s already here, and this documentary was an alarming reminder of its dangers. Until the people that have the power to affect some change screw their heads on straight, I’ll keep chatting with Claude, but rest assured that I’m still mad at them for letting this happen.