'The AI ​​Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist' Review: Lacks Necessary Nuance

AI is coming. AI is here. AI is a bubble. AI is the future we want. AI is the end. AI is the path to a better us (at least for those who survive).

A great topic, this artificial intelligence, with many different ways to think about it. Dealing with AI is a worthy endeavor for any filmmaker. (And by struggle I don't mean asking AI to make the movie for you.)

Daniel Roher, the man behind the Oscar-winning film “Navalny,” has attempted, along with co-director Charlie Tyrell, a nonfiction introduction of sorts to the biggest technological, social and existential challenge of our time with “The AI ​​Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” a title that features a hybrid currency that Roher takes from one of his interviewed experts — one of many, it turns out. “The AI ​​Doc” is a well-intentioned but irritating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.

Roher's approach is understandable to a conventional doctor. He assumes that many of us are tech-savvy, anxious, and confused as to what AI is to begin with. In his search for answers, Roher employs a saccharine framework: his beloved wife occasionally narrates as if from a storybook and Roher the protagonist of a terrifying adventure. The construction of the fable extends to a frenetic visual scheme of hand-drawn art and animation that interrupts our absorption process as if we were children in need of stimulation between all the talking heads.

As for AI itself, the experts—a mix of tech founders (like Sam Altman and Anthropic's Amodei brothers), historians, scientists, and assorted advocates and skeptics—come to Roher's house because he wants to bring to the forefront a key question as a future parent: Should I bring a child into this world?

Perhaps more urgently, should Roher have produced a paper on artificial intelligence that addressed us Do you like children? First, he flaunts all security threats, seeming to believe their warnings that a callous superintelligence is upon us and we cannot trust it. Then, sufficiently disturbed, he drags in the AI ​​cheerleaders, a suspiciously positive gang who can only imagine medical miracles and routine lives in which we are all full-time artists.

Only then, after this simplistic setup where platitudes reign, do we reach the section that treats the topic as the brave (and serious) new world that it is: geopolitically tense, economically fragile, and a playground for billionaires.

Why couldn't the complexity have been the dialogue from the beginning, instead of the silly caricature that “The AI ​​Doc” seems like for so long? Perhaps Roher believes this is what our increasingly gullible and truth-questioning citizenry needs from an explanatory document: a striking, kind reminder that we are the change we need to be.

But if you're thirsty for a sensible investigation into this sinister tool, one with an approach that treats you like the intelligent being you are, you'll have to wait for the AI ​​2.0 document.