The AI Doc Director Was Scared of AI, So He Made a Movie About It If you are feeling anxious about artificial intelligence and what it means for the future, a new documentary aims to provide some clarity. The film is called The AI Doc: Or, How I Became an Apocaloptimist. Its director, Oscar winner Daniel Roher, recently discussed his complicated feelings around the technology. Roher said the entire topic made him nervous, so he decided to team up with similarly concerned colleagues to demystify AI using film. He describes the project as a sort of first date with AI, a way to hear about its potential benefits from supporters while also taking in the warnings from critics. He believes it is probably too late to stop AI entirely, but thinks we can at least try to find ways to limit the worst impulses of the tech industry. I wanted to make this movie because I was scared, that is the crux of it, Roher said in an interview. I did not understand what AI was. I did not understand why everyone was talking about it and why it seemed to be this thing that came out of the woodwork. Ultimately, Roher arrived at the term apocaloptimist. This balances the contradictory ideas that AI can both seriously harm society, and that we can still shape the future by criticizing or outright rejecting it. It is a worldview, he said. It is choosing not to buy into a binary that asks us to see this as either the end of the world, or through the rose-colored glasses of unvarnished optimism. On one hand, he is well aware the major players pushing AI are, at best, flawed. Discussing prominent tech figures, Roher added, They are just weird. They are just people who became billionaires because they were born at the right time. They are brilliant in their own way, but they do not understand what it is to exist. They do not know what real human beings navigate. They have a very narrow worldview that is callous and cold and calculated. For many, the sudden ubiquity of this largely untested technology and the collective wealth of its backers means rampant negative consequences are almost guaranteed. But Roher’s perspective pushes back against pure cynicism. He points to a recent example: OpenAI’s Sora video generation tool, which faced heavy criticism for its potential to create realistic deepfakes, was pulled back last week. I think people were made uncomfortable by it, and good, Roher said. And, shame on OpenAI for releasing this thing without any thoughtfulness. I guess the low bar is that at least they had the decency to pull back, but only after public condemnation. To the cynical people saying we are all in trouble, I say collective action matters. The core goal of the film is to think more deeply about the uses of technology than the people creating it often do. These individuals, when you actually sit down with them, they do not have clarity, Roher said. They cannot make you feel better. They do not know themselves. They are just motivated by the unbridled optimism of the greatest profit-making technology in the history of humanity.
