Directed By Daniel Roher
Starring – Sam Altman, Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei
The Plot – From the Academy Award-winning filmmakers behind Everything Everywhere All at Once and Navalny; a father-to-be tries to figure out what is happening with all this AI insanity. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a hand-made, eye-opening documentary about the most powerful technology humanity has ever created… and what’s at stake if we get it wrong.
Rated PG-13 for adult language
THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST – Official Trailer [HD] – Only In Theaters March 27
POSITIVES
For better or worse, Artificial Intelligence feels primed to be this generation’s single most defining conflict, at the crossroads of a technologically advanced world that reaps the benefits of its many game-changing creations, and through Roher’s gently cautious and intimately sprawling education, we come to understand the advantages and disadvantages of such an intelligently advanced form of interpretation, making for an unsettling and insightful documentary that unearthed many surprises to the distinction of Roher’s approach. The biggest among them certainly pertains to that conversational dissection between optimism and negativity unearthed by a wide variety of speaking guests from those intimately clued into the capabilities of this proverbial elephant in the room, with a surprisingly grounded approach to its terminology that allows unknowledgeable audiences to keep a leg up on the focal points of every individualized section of its spirited debate, with Roher himself serving as the guiding link between the audience and those guests, in ways that find cleverly unique methods to contextualize the scientific terminology of what’s continuously being hurled at them. What’s vitally important is that Roher doesn’t dumb down the audience with the candid anxiousness of his honest approaches, instead meeting them at eye level in ways that allow for a significantly greater understanding of man’s need to want to even attempt to brandish something so potentially catastrophic, and with Roher enacting a touchingly sentimental underlining at the film’s core, involving the upcoming birth of his first child, the film not only materializes relatability towards a prominent host who spends the entirety of the film conjuring the many heavily hard-hitting questions that the guests attempt to grapple with, but also takes such a significantly sprawling outreach at this movie’s scope and condenses it towards feeling intimately sentimental in Daniel attempting to come to terms with the notion that his child will be forced to endure a world unrecognizable from his very own, inscribing something profoundly poignant to an insightfully articulate engagement that continuously rides the waves between an abundance of unique angles that make this discussion feel fully fleshed out from the four years that Daniel spent constructing the film. Without question, the most endearing aspect of its material, to me, stems from the film’s second half shifting to more of a business-oriented and political posturing towards wartime utilization that outlined the unrelenting urgency in each country’s desire to be the first to enact such unlimited power, in turn overlooking the safety and sanctions of unearthing something so vulnerable towards its people, all the while giving us a more thoroughly illustrated and elaborate picture of the attached responsibility of who is pouring gasoline on the grille of its expectations. During this section, the tempo and tone of the picture obviously deviates to a more threateningly ominous outlining that ironically demands grace to those irresponsible parties in power, but beyond that utilizes the unavoidably outdated relevance that documentaries always face in time-stamping subject matter that continues on, long after their films conclude, as a means of showcasing A.I’s overnight adaptability to constantly learn and grow within itself. While the film has zero qualms about gauging man’s intelligent inferiority to these machines, as a means of orchestrating a bleak future where human’s irrelevant value leaves them on the outside looking in, the starker and more impactful approach, for me, stems from the movie’s preaching for urgency towards unloading so much irreplicable damage in the knowledge and data to a machine in a single solitary day that intellectually grows it eight times superior to that of a child learning a whole day of scholastic information, and it’s in this aspect alone where the film values every second of its 99-minute runtime to convey the preciousness of each second spent debating something so critical, without anything that feels overly exaggerated or dramatically inauthentic, as a means to shill heavily-intentioned feelings to the molding of the audience’s interpretation. Beyond the many compelling talking points that are edited and transitioned seamlessly smooth to the consistency of its outline, Roher also unloads the kind of visually striking presentation that makes the material feel all the more effortlessly engaging to those interpreting it, with everything from hand-drawn animation, to corresponding imagery plucked from popular movies, to even somberly stirring song choices each conveying something artistically meaningful to Roher’s digestible personality plucked from the project. Though it’s definitely not the most important aspect of this or any documentary, Roher elicits the kind of visual pizazz in presentation that helps to keep the material from sagging like a wet blanket on the integrity of an interested audience, and while showcasing the impressive magnitude of the aforementioned editing throughout so many corresponding visuals, we get a greater sense of the time and creative energy that was spent on such an importantly urgent aspect of societal and technological growth, and one that flourishes beautifully in attaining the kind of big screen appeal that effectively justifies its limited engagement.
NEGATIVES
At 99 minutes, the extent of the material does feel slightly stretched at some points, and breezily rushed in others, throughout the movie’s consistency, particularly during a third act that not only jokingly finds trouble in a meaningfully appropriate ending, but also spends too much long-winded time providing closing arguments for every speaking guest entailed that feels more repetitious meandering than the rest of the film. Considering documentaries typically don’t include with them the kind of satisfying resolution that seamlessly closes the book on its subject matter, Roher’s optimism towards calling upon accountability towards political leaders and CEO’s who have a proven track record of selfishly acting against the world’s best intentions, makes his stitched together closing message feel naive at best, especially considering his preconceived anxiety giving way to eventual optimism feels unearned in requiring to take these business-oriented politicians at face value. While I commend CEO’s for even wanting to get involved with a project that might not present them in the most (With the exception of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who each opted out of being interviewed), I can’t help but feel strained by the toothlessness that the documentary takes on in Roher refusing to confront them for their devious deeds, requiring a bit more suspension of disbelief than any documentary should entail, all the while undermining Roher’s single most compelling angle as a previous skeptic about this kind of technology, which doesn’t feel as difficult to defuse as the filmmaker would have you believe. Beyond an overextended third act and some tough-to-swallow observational guests, my only other problem with the film pertained to the extent of its exploratory insight, without any kind of surprising insight or groundbreaking revelations that would help this cater to someone as well-versed in the A.I discourse that is currently all the rage on our planet. While I consider myself far from an expert on the subject, with regards to the program’s creation or capability, I can say that there was little in the film’s focal points that surmised anything eye-opening or unexpected with where Roher’s journey takes us, failing to capitalize on that unique aspect that separates documentaries centering around the same subject, and in turn leaving it simply feeling like a refresher course for its thoroughly documented aspects that cater much more exclusively to the curiously inexperienced, rather than those well-versed in day to day developments of this bigger than life technology.
OVERALL
The A.I Doc: Or How I Became a Apocaloptimist is an urgently vital and stylistically stimulating documentary about the benefits and vulnerabilities exposed in an Artificial Intelligence society, particularly those utilizing crucial personal information and societal patterns as a way of enacting a more disturbingly unsettling orchestration of the closer-than-you-realize unrecognizable future. While Daniel Roher’s plunging panic attack does deserve to be seen by everyone either enamored or alienated by this advanced technology, it offers very little than a refresher course to those with a maintained grip on its daily developments, in turn constructing a thought-provoking cautionary tale about autonomy that sneaks up on you in the worst ways imaginable
My Grade: 8.1 or B+