The new Focus Features documentary about artificial intelligence is falling more clearly into focus. A trailer dropped today for Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell’s The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, a film that starts with a question — what is AI? — and features experts, pessimists, optimists, realists and leading CEOs answering it and opening up about the future and the fate of the world.
This film unfolds as Roher, who appears on camera throughout, tells a personal story of falling in love with a fellow filmmaker, getting married and preparing to welcome a baby. He’s struck by the weight of a future amid the threat of AI and whether or not the world will be a safe place to raise a child. So he sets out to find some answers and speak to people who may have some. What he finds is a mix of promise and peril as it pertains to the new technology. In one chilling moment, one expert relays that someone who works in AI risk says their children won’t make it to high school while another opens up on the potential “abrupt extermination” of humanity.
Roher sits across from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and “doomers” like Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, Dan Hendrycks, Center for AI Safety director, and more. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is not just a series of talking heads, however, as it features stop-motion animation to help explain some of the stories and anecdotes that are shown.
“Visually, the film is a kaleidoscope, a constantly moving stream of archival news clips, colorful sketches drawn by Roher, animation and a parade of experts, photographed with the lights and cameras around them in full view. The style all but shouts that it’s a movie with talking heads that doesn’t want to be boring, and there’s a hyper feel to the pacing, as if the directors were afraid to slow down,” explains The Hollywood Reporter critic Caryn James in her review.
The new trailer comes on the heels of the film’s world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and ahead of its showing at SXSW. The film hits theaters from Focus on March 27. From the Academy Award-winning director Roher (Navalny) and Tyrell (My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes), the doc has an impressive roster of producers including the Oscar-winning teams from Everything Everywhere All at Once including Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang, and Navalny like Shane Boris, Diane Becker and Ted Tremper.
