There are two kinds of people in the world now: those who think AI is going to save humanity and those who think it is going to turn us into obedient little meat batteries before lunch. Then there is The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist, which takes one look at this whole glorious technological nervous breakdown and says: “Hey, maybe everybody is simultaneously right, wrong, terrified, dazzled and completely out of their minds.”
And thank God for that.
The most refreshing thing about this documentary is it doesn't march into the AI apocalypse wearing either a black cloak or a Google-approved halo. Instead, it wanders into the madhouse with its eyes open. The film understands that artificial intelligence is not merely another shiny gadget or another chapter in the history of computers. It is a gigantic cultural Rorschach test onto which we project every hope and terror we've accumulated since somebody first figured out how to make fire.
What I especially enjoyed is the film's refusal to treat uncertainty as a failure. That's practically revolutionary in an age when every technological evangelist has a five-year prediction and every doomsayer has a countdown clock. The documentary is willing to ask the annoying questions: What happens to human creativity? What happens to work? What happens when machines become better than us at things we once considered uniquely human? And, perhaps most terrifyingly, what happens when we start believing whatever the machine tells us simply because it says it with the confidence of a digital psychopath?
The film includes interviews with every high-profile AI critic and industry executive you can name, except for Elon Musk (who ultimately decided he was too busy) and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who declined the offer. One of the more noteworthy conversations is with Open AI CEO Sam Altman, who seems to struggle with the realization he might have helped create something he isn’t convinced he can can control.
But the movie doesn't collapse into despair. Its “apocaloptimist” attitude is the key. That's not the same thing as blind optimism. It's more like staring into the abyss and noticing that, hey, the abyss has some pretty interesting software.
I found myself laughing, worrying and occasionally wanting to grab filmmakers Daniel Roher & Charlie Tyrell by the shoulders and yell, “Have you people completely lost your minds?” Which, as far as I'm concerned, is a pretty good response to any documentary about AI. The subject is inherently absurd: we've created machines that can write, draw, talk, imitate, calculate and increasingly surprise us, and now we're frantically trying to figure out what the hell we just built.
The film's greatest strength is that it makes this enormous subject feel personal. Rather than leaving AI in the sterile territory of laboratories, corporate boardrooms and futuristic abstractions, it connects the technology to the ordinary human question underneath all the circuitry: What kind of people do we want to become? And do we really want to bring a child into this world where there are so many scary unknowns?
That's the question that sticks with me after the credits. Not “Will AI destroy us?” Not “Will AI make everything wonderful?” Those are children's-book questions. The interesting question is what we choose to do with an enormously powerful new technology while we still have choices.
The AI Doc doesn't pretend to have the final answer—and that is precisely why I trusted it. It's curious without being credulous, alarmed without being hysterical, and optimistic without putting a smiley face on the apocalypse.
In other words, it's a documentary about AI made by people who haven't forgotten that the most interesting machine in the room is still the human being staring at the screen.
The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist is currently streaming on Netflix.