This review contains spoilers.

“The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” which was released in theaters March 30, was advertised as “the most urgent film of our time.” While the powerful review convinced me to watch the documentary, it failed to live up to my expectations.

It is a mostly balanced discussion of humanity’s future amidst the prevalent use of artificial intelligence, but it still could have greatly benefited from more detailed information about AI risks. 

Despite the film only being 1 hour and 44 minutes long, it tackles a long list of AI risks, including mental health, deepfakes, geopolitical tensions and power-seeking behavior. In large part because the documentary covered so many subtopics, I felt as though it was not able to explore each risk with specific cases that I didn’t previously know about. 

Since I’ve done AI policy work in the past, I was already acquainted with a majority of the research and risks discussed in the film. While I might have been more informed than the target audience, I was still disappointed that I didn’t learn as much about the potential consequences of AI as I’d hoped. 

Throughout the film, Daniel Roher, one of the documentary’s directors, asks questions about AI to experts and CEOs of AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The experts answer his questions, some solemn while others more optimistic. 

One of Roher’s recurring questions is about whether the interviewee wants to have children. 

“I know people who work on AI risk who don’t expect their kids to make it to high school,” Tristan Harris, co-founder of Center for Humane Technology, said.

Between shots of the various answers to Roher’s many questions, the film cuts to his own reactions. 

Sometimes, he sits in disturbed silence. These pauses benefit the documentary, allowing the audience to process the experts’ answers. However, the long, repetitive silences began to feel slightly overdramatic to me. 

Silence is also apparent in Roher’s interview with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT. When Roher asks Altman about the future of AI, Altman takes a few moments of silence to process his thoughts. 

Unlike other interview sections, the moments between Roher’s questions and Altman’s answers are not optimized for time. It was terrifying to see one of the most powerful people in AI be even slightly uncertain about difficult questions about the technology’s future. I felt it was deeply important for the director to include Altman’s hesitation.

Near the end of the documentary, Roher talks on the phone with his parents, during which they ask him about the film’s premise and its progress. He responds with a brief overview of the film and expresses uncertainty about where humanity is headed with AI. 

“That’s what’s frustrating about it: no one knows,” Roher said.

Roher’s irritation is valid. It was comforting to know that someone else is as discontent as I am about the lack of answers in AI’s potential future and how governments could regulate it as its capabilities strengthen. 

To Roher’s credit, I was thoroughly impressed by the variety of sources he interviewed. He spoke with AI researchers and professors from academic institutions such as Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, an AI reporter and even the founder and president of Encode. Encode is a youth-led organization founded by Stanford senior Sneha Revanur that seeks to “fight to keep AI’s promise alive through nonpartisan policy action and public education,” according to its website.

With a wide range of perspectives, the documentary is able to deliver a more often than not balanced exploration of the promises and perils of AI. The tone of the film switches from disheartening to varying degrees of hope quite frequently. While watching the film, it felt appropriately disorienting and reflective of my internal debates. 

Even though I didn’t love the documentary and wished it presented more information I wasn’t already aware of, I don’t regret watching it. I wouldn’t highly recommend the film, but I wouldn’t discourage anyone interested in AI from watching it either. 

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