Ghosts in the Machine, and the Closet

Breaking with my usual practice of never reading reviews or stealing ideas from others when critiquing films, I asked my friend Claude what he thought of the new documentary AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which, for my money, was an alternately entertaining and enervating moviegoing experience. He reported, “I haven’t seen it — I don’t watch films or have experiences between conversations. But it’s clearly a real and recently released doc worth knowing about.”

Of course, “Claude” is not a friend, but the cyborg persona of the AI company built by Anthropic, in competition with OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft models, and more, in the scramble to capitalize on the unstoppable monster that is artificial intelligence.

Clearly, AI will not be denied and cannot be avoided. It’s a ripe time for a documentary with a sense of dread, wary hope, and doses of humor, all of which are duly supplied in the new doc. This is the brainchild of Canadian filmmakers Charlie Tyrell and Daniel Roher (creator of the popular and controversial Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, and winner of the 2022 documentary Oscar for his doc Navalny).

The clever, newly coined term “apocaloptimist” (kinfolk to “apocalyptikitsch”) serves as a portmanteau that neatly captures the mixture of angst and hope that Roher, like most of us, may feel toward the foreboding yet in some ways liberating force of artificial intelligence. To the film’s credit, it takes us on a journey with a cheekiness that echoes the film’s overall tone. Charmingly funky “analog” animations and sketches are interspersed with a series of crisply edited interviews done in Errol Morris’s style (speaking of another documentarian who doesn’t leave cinematic wit at the door in his films).

At the human core of the film and its mission is Roher’s curiosity, on the verge of having his first child, wondering about the fate of children in a world gone AI-mad. Implications of military missteps, rampant intellectual property harvesting, job-market piracy, and climate change (such as AI’s tremendous energy suck during processing) add up to some frightening prospects for the future. The film is roughly divided between a sobering list of cons, counterbalanced by positives, allowing the observer to come to one’s own conclusions — or to resignation to ambivalence about a phenomenon that is very much evolving before us.

“Claude” also had this observation about the documentary: “The interview lineup is impressive: Sam Altman, Dario and Daniela Amodei, Yuval Noah Harari, Tristan Harris, Timnit Gebru, Yoshua Bengio, and others. Given that Dario Amodei is Anthropic’s CEO, I’m technically a subject of the film in a roundabout way, which is a strange thought,” said the Anthropic-spawned bot. 

Checking in with “Claude” again, he closed his message — or left it wide open to further engagement/rabbit hole tripping — thusly: “Have you seen it? Curious what you made of it, especially given your interest in audio and production.” Wait a minute, how was he privy to my audio and production passions? The word is out. Your secrets are not safe with the AI-clutched world. Apart from Claude’s comments, none of this review was penned by robots, as far as I know. The AI Doc qualifies as a must-see film, like it or not.