When the filmmakers behind “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” set out to investigate the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence, they couldn’t predict what the next two-and-a-half years would have in store.
The Focus Features documentary, in theaters now, explores the intersection of AI development and its impact on humanity from a personal perspective. When co-directors Daniel Roher (an Academy Award winner for 2022’s “Navalny”) and Charlie Tyrell (“Broken Orchestra”) learned they would both become fathers in early 2024, they anchored the film around one question: What kind of world will our children inherit?
To answer that query, producer Ted Tremper developed more than 100 contacts, including sources inside the major AI labs, and conducted pre-interviews lasting up to 20 hours. Meanwhile, Roher and Tryell interviewed more than 40 AI experts on camera, generating 3,300 pages of transcripts. Their planned year of production stretched into nearly three.
So, what did they learn about AI that you need to know?
“The biggest realization was that there probably isn’t an ‘off switch,’” Tyrell explains. “AI isn’t a tool we can just decide to reject; it’s already here. And it’s going to keep integrating into our lives in ways both visible and invisible.”
That realization was both “unsettling and clarifying,” the director says. “It shifted my thinking from ‘Should this exist?’ to ‘How do we live with it responsibly?’ Once you accept that it’s not going away, the conversation becomes a lot more urgent and a lot more practical. It’s a lot like grieving — which is a little overwhelming — grieving for a pre-AI world that no longer exists. But that needs to be acknowledged in order to move forward and carry on.”
Variety chief film critic Owen Gleiberman described the finished product as a “scary, dizzying and essential deep dive into the AI revolution.” In his review, Gleiberman wrote: “If you have any interest in artificial intelligence (which is to say: the future), you should go out and see it right now.”
To be clear, the documentary doesn’t pick sides in the AI debate. That’s why the film’s title includes the made-up word “apocaloptimist,” as it embodies the filmmakers’ philosophy of avoiding both doomsday scenarios and unchecked enthusiasm.
“It’s not just a word, it’s a way of life,” Roher told Variety at Sundance, where the documentary made its world premiere. “In a world that’s asking us to embrace visions of the apocalypse or lean into this unbridled optimism, we are saying no, there’s a third path.”
With that in mind, what advice can these filmmakers-turned-pseudo-experts share about engaging with AI?
“There isn’t a single correct way,” Tyrell says. “And that’s actually the point. It’s going to meet people wherever they’re at.”
While “The AI Doc” team — which also includes producers Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), as well as Shane Boris and Diane Becker (“Navalny”) — engaged with artificial intelligence by making this film, “someone else might encounter it as a teacher, a coder, a parent or a civil servant, and their relationship to it will look completely different.”
Tyrell concludes: “What matters is that people engage with it consciously rather than passively. You don’t have to embrace it or reject it outright, but you should be aware of how it’s shaping your work, your thinking, and your world and make intentional choices from there.”
Here, Tyrell and Tremper share more of what they learned and everyone needs to know:
We cannot separate the promise of AI from the peril of AI. We need to avoid the very understandable temptation to label AI as “good” or “bad” and call it a day. The reality is messier, which… is a real drag. However, when we abandon that dichotomy, our mission as a species actually becomes incredibly clear: we need to immediately get serious about shaping how this technology is being developed and deployed, and ensure that it benefits humanity and the planet.
The window for how we shape AI is open — it really, actually is — but it won’t be forever. The norms, laws, and standards being built right now will have an enormous impact on the future of our planet and our species. The good news: there is genuine bipartisan support for common-sense AI regulation and international coordination. But regulation alone is not enough. The general public needs to get organized, get loud, and send clear messages to the companies building these tools, and the governments regulating the technology, about how we want AI to impact our lives — whether that’s as simple as voting with your dollars, or as ambitious as building a grassroots movement like one of our film’s subjects, Sneha Revenur, did with the Encode movement. We need to drive these decisions, individually and collectively. Because if we don’t, those in power will be more than happy to make the decisions for us.
You can choose not to understand how AI is affecting your life. But it will affect your life anyway. AI is already deciding whether your loan gets approved, whether you get a job interview, what news reaches you, how your child learns at school, how your parent gets care from their doctor, and thousands and thousands of other invisible decisions with very real consequences. You don’t need to become an AI expert. It starts with asking simple questions where you find AI encroaching on your life and the lives of those you love. Questions like who built this, do we share the same basic values, what were they optimizing for, and whose interests does it serve?
Our work will never be done — but that work doesn’t have to suck. There’s no finish line where we declare we’ve “solved” AI and set off a shitload of fireworks. The technology will keep evolving, the problems will keep shifting. And so too will the benefits (if we can move quickly enough to keep the perils in check). The great part is, there are brilliant, kind, wonderful people working on all sides of this issue — many of them are in our film. You should seek them out, learn from them, let them spark your curiosity, and inspire you to do what you can to help care for our planet and build a future worth living in. Find community, find purpose, and hopefully come to realize that even though the work is never done, it is absolutely worth doing.
Being an optimist or a pessimist is not enough. We need to become apocaloptimists. An optimist believes things will work out. A pessimist believes they won’t. Neither requires action because the endings to their stories have already been written. An apocaloptimist looks at the full range of what’s possible — all the promise and all the peril — and chooses to coordinate with others to build a future worth living in. It’s not a comfortable worldview. It doesn’t let you off the hook. But it’s the only one that’s actually true — and the only one that gives you a reason to act.
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