Full doc title: “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist”
Per wiki:
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a 2026 American documentary film directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. It is produced by the Academy Award-winning teams behind Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang) and Navalny (Shane Boris and Diane Becker).
What to say here? This is a doc being produced by the producer and one of the directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once, who notably have been making efforts to, uh, negotiate? I guess? with AI companies vis a vis making movies. Anyway the title is a piece of shit and this trailer makes it look like this is just critihype the movie. I guess we’ll hear more about it in the coming month.
Really interesting framing this as brought about by thinking about the director’s child, given Yud’s recent comments about how one should raise a daughter if you had certain beliefs about AI.
Sam Altman and the other CEOS being there is such a joke “this technology is so dangerous guys! of course I’m gonna keep blocking regulation for it, I need to make money after all!” Also, I’m shocked Emily Bender and Timmit Gebru are there, aren’t they AI skeptics?
@lurker I don’t know that I’d call them skeptics universally, they are experts in the AI field who are EXTREMELY skeptical of the TESCREAL complex and of the *hype* of the current fad LLM and image generation tools.
Whatever you call them, it’s *positive* that a documentary includes conflicting viewpoints, from the people who see them. The plausible range of near-term AI developments is smaller than the range of widely-held expectations. A documentary has to address the crazies & the skeptics
I took a deeper look into the documentary, and it does go into both the pessimist and optimist perspectives, so their inclusion makes more sense. and yeah, I was trying to get at how they’re skeptical of the TESCREAL stuff and of current LLM capabilities