Sundance film The AI Doc probes the promises and perils of artificial intelligence

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell and produced by Daniel Kwan, is screening at the Sundance film festival and will be released on 27 March. The documentary follows Roher’s personal anxiety about AI as he asks whether it is safe to bring a child into a world rapidly transformed by the technology.

Roher’s interest began while experimenting with public tools from OpenAI, which both thrilled and unnerved him. The film foregrounds that even basic definitions are contested — “what is AI?” — and that leading researchers say there are aspects of models humans cannot and will never fully understand.

One expert notes models are trained on “more data than anyone could ever read in several lifetimes,” and Tristan Harris warns, “Any example you put in this movie will look absolutely clumsy by the time the movie comes out.” The documentary presents a strong doomerist view as well as opposing optimism.

Interviewees worried about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) include Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin, Ajeya Cotra and Eli Yudkowsky, whose 2025 book is titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Dan Hendrycks is quoted saying AGI could “become superhuman maybe in this decade,” and Connor Leahy compares a future relationship between super-intelligent AGI and humans to that of humans and ants.