For Daniel Roher, the documentary filmmaker behind 2022’s essential Academy Award winner, Navalny, AI (Artificial Intelligence) isn’t just an abstract construct or the latest technological wonder endlessly hyped by Silicone Valley CEOs, the mainstream media, and tech influencers, to every other company, public institution, or government entity in the world.
Instead, it's deeply personal and idiosyncratic, driven by the anxiety surrounding parenthood, specifically the pregnancy of his filmmaker wife, Caroline Lindy (Your Monster), and the upcoming birth of their son. What future, Roher wonders, awaits his son?
Luckily for Roher, his background in the documentary world, not to mention winning an Oscar, gave him more than enough credibility to connect with some of the best and brightest in the AI field, bring them into his studio, and interview them one-by-one, asking them significant questions, from defining AI in the clearest, most cogent terms -- a seemingly simple query that leads to surprisingly vague, even contradictory answers -- to unconstrained AI used in military warfare (shades of not just the fictional Skynet of James Cameron’s Terminator series, but current-day Palantir and Anthropic and their respectve AI tech), the environmental, social, and political costs, and everything in between.
Roher and co-director Charlie Terrell (My Dead Dad's Porno Tapes) interview more than 30 AI-related luminaries, experts, and CEOs, including, among others, OpenAI’s controversial frontman, Sam Altman, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and his sister, co-founder/president Daniela Amodei. XAI's Elon Musk and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg both received invites to appear onscreen. Musk agreed to participate in the documentary, but never showed. Zuckerberg never returned Roher and Terrell’s call.
Collectively, they presumably represent some of the smartest thinkers on and about the past, present, and future of AI, or at least, among the world’s wealthiest tech CEOs. (Wealth, of course, does not necessarily equate to intelligence, human or otherwise.)
True to the slightly overlong, if hard to forget, title, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist falls into roughly two perspectives, the pessimists or doomers sounding the alarm about the risks, dangers, and downsides of AI, and the optimists or accelerationists, its potential rewards, benefits, and upsides, with Roher and Terrell eventually falling somewhere in the middle of the scale, neither believers in an upcoming AI apocalypse nor an AI-centered uopia of overabundance, the elimination of economic inequality, and unlimited leisure time. That might sound noncommittal, reflecting an eagerness not to take a stance on AI generally or specifically, but it highlights the key inflection point facing us individually and collectively.
Regardless of where Roher and Tyrell ultimately fall on the pro- or anti-AI spectrum, the documentary speedruns through key subjects, including, but not limited to, the current and/or true economic costs of AI adoption and its environmental consequences (e.g., water and electricity diverted from agriculture and urban infrastructure), its worldwide impact, especially on developing countries, and the potentially transformative social, cultural, and political effects on widespread AI adoption, good, bad or neutral.
As a much-needed AI primer, especially viewed with another festival-premiering documentary, Ghost in the Machine, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist automatically makes it must-see filmmaking for anyone — and everyone — interested in learning more about one of the key issues of our times.
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, subsequently playing at the 2026 South By Southwest Film & TV Festival before opening in movie theaters on Friday, March 27, via Focus Features.