Could AI Make This Documentary? Filmmakers Grapple With The Rise Of The Machines
Two new documentaries about AI reveal the good, the bad, and the apocalyptic of tech that is transforming us all.
How do you make a movie about AI that’s not going to be out of date within 24 hours? That was the question that Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, co-directors for the blistering new documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, had to grapple with over the course of the three years that they worked on the film. The film was conceived when Roher learned that he and his wife, fellow filmmaker Caroline Lindy, were expecting their first child, and he — well — had a crash-out over whether now was a good time to raise a kid. His fears especially circled around AI, a technology that even three years ago was getting hundreds of billions of dollars of investment from big tech companies. Today, the spending on its development can be measured in trillions. As such, what was expected to be a one-year production turned into three as investments rose and the technology made more and more advancements.
“One of the biggest challenges making the film is, how do we find the evergreen version of the story that's going to maintain relevance beyond the news cycle of AI?” Charlie Tyrell tells Inverse. “It is so rapidly evolving. And we, I think, found a way to do that with this film.”
The AI Doc of a year ago would’ve looked very different from what was released today, or what would be released next year, Tyrell acknowledges. But “I'm glad that we released what we have right now, because as you know, with the news cycle of what's happening with Anthropic and everything, we are coming at a time where ... some things that the film says that are very appropriate for what's going on right now.”
And as AI, and our understanding of it, rapidly advances, we’ll only get more and more documentaries dissecting what it could mean for humanity. The proof is in the buzzy release of two separate AI-centric documentaries at Sundance: Rocher’s The AI Doc (which makes its SXSW premiere this weekend) and Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine. Both paint a bleak picture of AI’s rapid growth, and what that means for its economic and sociopolitical footprint. If you’re an AI skeptic, like I am, you’re likely to come away from both with a similar mindset as when you went in. But where The AI Doc offers a more comprehensive look at AI and what it means for our future by offering a “both sides” portrait that interviews everyone from technologists to tech CEOs, Ghost in the Machine takes a different approach, and looks to our past.
The Bro In the Machine
Microsoft launched Tay in 2016.
Veatch’s film begins with the famous quote from Antonio Gramsci that declares, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.” That exact quote is probably not something Gramsci actually said or wrote, which is both perfect and terrible for a documentary about AI.
Veatch’s film launches into a case study of Tay, the AI-powered chatbot that Microsoft launched on Twitter in 2016 — an experiment that quickly went off the rails once Tay started spewing Nazi missives and celebrating Hitler. It was a cautionary tale that the Silicon Valley did not heed, Ghost in the Machine warns, as it launches into a comprehensive and exhaustive history of the origins of “artificial intelligence,” tracing its etymology all the way back to eugenics. It’s a fascinating analysis, one provided by various philosophers, cultural critics, and historians, compared to The AI Doc’s wealth of technologists.
It’s the kind of outsider perspective to the “tech bro” community that Veatch thought was essential as more and more industries embrace AI. “The tech bro narrative and power structure, as we see in Ghost in the Machine, is ubiquitous,” she told Filmmaker Magazine. “Their perspectives fill every page of our newspapers, our politicians breathlessly capitulate to them… The sanctimonious exceptionalism of the tech industry — we should not regulate AI, we should not question the nonconsensual integration of AI into every piece of software — perpetuates their consolidation of power, and I wouldn’t trust a story that featured their voices. If you look at the films around AI that feature the tech bros, their conclusions are ‘let the boys keep building their toys.’ Our story cuts to the heart of this.”
If anyone who had been following the rise of AI with any degree of concern, Veatch’s documentary is hardly shocking. Its most interesting and novel argument — that the modern concepts of intelligence are rooted in eugenics, thus giving “artificial intelligence” a rotten foundation from the beginning — is perhaps its biggest contribution to the ongoing AI conversation, but one that feels limited by Veatch’s “essay doc” approach.
Apocaloptimism Now
On the other hand, The AI Doc brings the viewer on a journey through the pitfalls and potential of AI, featuring some of the most prolific industry experts, including OpenAI CEO himself, Sam Altman (Elon Musk, apparently, said yes but was “busy”). At first, the film’s more hopeful approach to AI feels too naive, but The AI Doc deftly charts Roher’s journey from doomer to optimist to, finally, “apocaloptimist,” the term that their documentary coins for someone who is realistic about the real dangers that unregulated AI technology poses, while also having hope for its potential.
Tyrell sums up their findings after making the documentary: “I believe in the technology, but I don't believe in the tech companies. I’m fully an apocaloptimist,” he says.
In the film, Roher embarks on a journey to ask technologists and industry experts what AI really means for our society. He listens to doomers who estimate 5-10 years before AI renders our society an apocalyptic wasteland. He cheers up when optimists paint a utopian picture of a future where AI technology replaces our manual laborers and teachers, allowing people to pursue their passions. And he makes peace with the idea that the reality may be something in between: accepting that no matter what, these new technologies are part of our lives — but that doesn’t mean we need to embrace them all uncritically.
“In a world where tech companies are extraordinarily powerful, it's incumbent upon all of us to really be discerning and thoughtful about the technology we use and how we use it,” Roher tells Inverse. “And that may seem very basic, but it's something that people really need reminding of. What do you want this technology for? How do you want this to be implemented? How is it going to empower you or how is it going to replace you? Thinking about these things from that lens and perspective, I think is just a really pragmatic and empowering thing that anybody can do.”
Throughout the course of the film, Roher grapples with being a new dad — the “human angle” that Roher and Tyrell found necessary to help ground a film that was about so many inhuman topics. But Roher wasn’t the only one dealing with parenthood through the production of the film — Tyrell was going through the same journey behind the camera. “Daniel and my sons were born a week apart,” Tyrell says. “So every single step of this film, I was the off camera dad going through existential attacks and anxiety attacks, and the film definitely represents that.”
Prompts For the Public Good?
Still, there is plenty of overlap between both documentaries — The AI Doc and Ghost in the Machine both touch on the conversations about “Generative AI,” or Gen AI, aka AI that will achieve a level of “superintelligence” that surpasses human capabilities. And both, of course, give ample attention to the pressing concerns around AI: the environmental impact.
But Roher and Tyrell aren’t concerned that the AI documentary space is becoming increasingly crowded with urgent films warning about the dangers of the technology.
“First and foremost, I think it's amazing that a lot of these films are coming out,” Roher says. “This is really, really important. The more, the merrier. The more people that can engage with this material, the better we will all be.”
Both The AI Doc and Ghost in the Machine had different missions. Tyrell and Roher’s was “to very clearly synthesize and explain what this is in a way that is accessible to the non-techy people out there, the moms and dads of the world that don't really know or appreciate what is coming down the pike.” Ghost in the Machine was to offer a perspective outside of the “tech bro” voice that dominated the AI space.
But in the end, Roher believes that both docs, and potential future ones are “a public service that's very important.” (Though Ghost in the Machine mostly lets you sit with the bleak reality.) That’s why The AI Doc ends in a call to action: for those who watched the movie to process what they saw, and both the dangers and potential that AI holds, and do something about it.
“From my perspective, there are companies who embody my own values more than others, and I support them with my money,” Roher says. “And I vote for politicians who are being proactive about this issue. I don't want this to become politicized, but inevitably it will be. So those are just a few ways that I kind of live and embody the apocaloptimist mantra.”
