‘This train isn’t going to stop’: shocking Sundance film shows promises and perils of AI

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, co-directed by Daniel Roher, delves into the world of AI through the lens of personal anxiety

Are we barreling toward AI catastrophe? Is AI an existential threat, or an epochal opportunity? Those are the questions top of mind for a new documentary at Sundance, which features leading AI experts, critics and entrepreneurs, including Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, with views on the near-to-midterm future ranging from doom to utopia.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell and produced by Daniel Kwan (one half of The Daniels, the Oscar-winning duo behind Everything Everywhere All At Once), delves into the contentious topic of AI through Roher's own anxiety. The Canadian film-maker, who won an Oscar in 2023 for the documentary Navalny, first became interested in the topic while experimenting with tools released by OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT. The sophistication of the public tools - the ability to produce whole paragraphs in seconds, or produce illustrations - both thrilled and unnerved him. AI was already radically shaping the film-making industry, and proclamations on the promise and peril of AI were everywhere, with little way for people outside the tech industry to evaluate them. As an artist, he wondered, how was he to make sense of it all?