Summer Film Festival: “The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist”
- Matt Palmer
- Jul 19
- 3 min read
The Dietrich Theater’s Summer Film Festival has started and it’s time to check out a few films that the film festival has to offer. For the first of four film festival selections that I plan on checking out, I checked out the documentary “The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.”
Hoping to figure out what’s happening with artificial intelligence, a father-to-be embarks on an eye-opening journey to learn more about the powerful technology humanity has ever created - and what’s at stake if we get it wrong.
I became highly intrigued with this documentary after seeing the film’s trailer, especially since the subject of A.I. is still an ongoing hot topic just about everywhere. After giving this film a look, “The A.I. Doc” is a highly intimate, anxious, yet ultimately balanced look at artificial intelligence.
The documentary does what it can to keep things grounded and not too complicated, and it does a great job keeping a balanced, roller-coaster presentation of a dense and sometimes terrifying topic. From what I’ve read online, some viewers found the personal narrative a bit self-serving, yet I think the film easily functions as a very engaging, thought-provoking feature that serves as an essential introduction to the A.I. debate - even with the director’s personal narrative.
One aspect of this film that really intrigued me is that the documentary is structured specifically to present widely contrasting, separate perspectives on artificial intelligence. Rather than choosing one side, the film sets up a deliberate intellectual tug of war between different sides.
The first group are the industry leaders and tech-optimists building this technology. They pitch A.I. as a revolutionary tool that could cure diseases, solve climate change and even unlock unimaginable human potential. Then there’s the second group of researchers who believe that A.I. poses a literal threat to human survival and they argue that building something smarter than ourselves is incredibly dangerous, famously
comparing the risk of uncontrolled A.I. to the threat of global nuclear war.
The third vital perspective focuses on the harm that A.I. is causing right now as this group points out immediate issues like algorithmic bias, data exploitation, job displacement and much more.
Besides the whiplash of various perspectives, the documentary stays grounded as the film’s director (Daniel Roher) is expecting his first child with his wife and is trying to decide if bringing a child into an A.I.-driven world is a good idea. After watching some of these moments, you could possibly begin to ask yourself, “what will the world look like when this child is a teenager years from now?”
In one of the film’s most pivotal moments, Roher asks OpenAI’s Sam Altman to guarantee that nothing terrible will happen as a result of his work. Altman’s candid admission that he can’t make that promise is a chilling, thought-provoking realization for the viewer. It highlights a truth that some of the people building the future don’t entirely know how to control it.
The documentary “The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” explores the premises and perils of A.I. through the personal lens of filmmaker Daniel Roher. Confronting impending fatherhood, Roher navigates the conflicting extremes of various viewpoints of artificial intelligence.
MPA: Rated PG-13 for language (runtime 104 minutes)
Show dates and times at the Summer Film Festival: Friday 7/24 - 5 pm; Tuesday 7/28 - 4:30 pm; Sunday 8/2 - 7 pm.
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