A New AI Documentary Puts CEOs in the Hot Seat—but Goes Too Easy on Them

It’s not easy to get an interview with Sam Altman—just ask Adam Bhala Lough, the filmmaker behind the recent documentary Deepfaking Sam Altman. Lough originally planned a feature exploring the potential and perils of AI that would center on a conversation with the OpenAI CEO. But, after having his inquiries ignored for months, he opted instead to commission a chatbot that mimicked Altman’s speech patterns and approximated his facial expressions by way of a digital avatar.

The real Altman did sit down, however, for the new feature The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which hits theaters March 27. So did Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and Demis Hassabis, a cofounder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind Technologies. It’s an impressive level of access for codirector Daniel Roher, whose 2022 documentary Navalny won an Academy Award. The problem is that once they’re on camera, Altman et al. say little we haven’t heard before—and they skate by on glib answers concerning their responsibilities to the rest of their species.

The AI Doc is framed by Roher’s anxiety over the impending arrival of his son. He wonders what kind of a world his boy will inherit and whether the rise of artificial intelligence will preclude the experiences that develop us into self-sufficient adults. Despite the sense of mounting panic, Roher and codirector Charlie Tyrell present an admirably robust crash course in AI, helped along by Roher’s insistence on defining terms in plain language. Visually, the film is charmingly human, featuring colorful drawings and whimsical stop-motion sequences.

Yet later interviews with Silicon Valley techno-optimists pass without much interrogation of grandiose claims. There is barely a moment spent considering why or how we should expect the current crop of fallible large language models to give rise to the mythical “artificial general intelligence” (AGI). The documentary accurately conveys how the unregulated AI gold rush is driven by the perverse incentives of a global market, yet it eventually carves out a position in which the general public, not the executives, are tasked with steering the AI revolution in the right direction. The film concludes by suggesting that ordinary citizens can pressure governments and corporations to ensure that AI evolves safely, a vision of change that remains hazy at best.