The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is in theaters now

I went to a movie theater to watch an AI documentary, which, I'll be honest, felt a little ironic.

Like, this is the thing I needed to leave my house for?

And when I say "movie theater," I mean... There were basically three of us in there. My plus one and I, and one other person. For a documentary trying to make sense of something shaping everyone's future, that felt a little telling.

I'm really curious what happens when it hits streaming. That's probably where it finds its actual audience.

The film is co-directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, and it follows Daniel right as he's about to have a baby, trying to understand what kind of world he's bringing a child into. Instead of pretending to have answers, he leans into the not-knowing, which was honestly refreshing.

One thing I didn't expect and really liked: how self-aware and overtly "made by humans" the whole thing feels. You see the sets. You see the edges. It doesn't try to hide how it's made. And throughout, there are these drawings from Daniel, very physical, tactile moments where you can feel the human effort behind it. It's produced by the Academy Award-winning team behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, and you can feel that in the tone. That same mix of chaos, creativity, and intention.

The doc moves through a few different emotional phases. It starts with wait, what even is this? Then drifts into okay, this could be really bad, like end-of-the-human-race doom and gloom. Then you hear the optimistic takes, including Peter Diamandis, founder of XPRIZE. And then you kind of land somewhere in the middle, still not totally sure what to do with it.

There's a section comparing AI to nuclear warfare, which sounds dramatic. But the thing they're missing in that analogy is that nuclear weapons are expensive and controlled. This isn't. AI is already in everyone's hands, which makes it harder to define and harder to contain.

They talk to a range of people building and thinking about this space, including CEOs of some of the biggest companies, though notably without voices like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology, who you might recognize from The Social Dilemma, is in there. His signature heaviness definitely comes through. At one point, when asked if he would have a child, his answer is no, and that kids today might not even make it to their teenage years.

Not exactly uplifting.

And then you have someone like Sam Altman, who's openly excited about having a child. What stood out to me wasn't any big definitive statement from him. It was more the feeling underneath it. Like, even at that level, there isn't a clean, confident answer about where any of this is going. That's kind of frightening too.

I was engaged. It was thoughtful. But I also had this moment of... this took a few years to make. He talked to everyone, followed every angle, and there's still no answer. Which isn't a knock on the film. That's kind of the point.

We're all waiting for someone to tell us exactly what this is going to be. And the reality is, no one really can.

The film does point to some clear needs: independent oversight that isn't tied to the same incentives as the companies building this, real accountability for when things go wrong, actual safety standards instead of moving fast and fixing it later.

And then there's the less comfortable part. Us. How we adapt, how we use these tools, and how we keep evolving our own thinking instead of outsourcing it.

There's also this thread throughout the doc that pulls in footage of protests and walkouts from the past, a reminder that real shifts have always come from people deciding something needed to change. Which makes all of this feel a little less abstract and a little more immediate.

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