‘I’m Expecting a Baby—Are We Doomed?’: Inside ‘The AI Doc’

(SeaPRwire) –   In 2023, just as director Daniel Roher began working on a film exploring AI and humanity’s future, he and his wife Caroline learned they were expecting a child. Roher noted that crafting a 90-minute movie about a topic as massive, significant, and all-encompassing as AI had felt “nearly impossible.” But the arrival of their first child gave him a way to anchor the film.

“People connect with babies—everyone loves babies!” Roher shared during a Sundance Film Festival panel.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist shifted to center on Roher and his wife, following the soon-to-be father as he sought out experts and leading AI CEOs to grasp the technology’s trajectory. “I wasn’t thrilled with it,” he shared. “[But] I guess I’ve spent my entire life preparing to play a bit of a fool in a film.”

The AI Doc’s tactic of breaking down an abstract subject via a personal narrative mirrors Navalny, Roher’s 2023 Oscar-winning documentary, which framed the terror and dark humor of the Russian state through a glimpse into opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s life and his family. Just like in Navalny, this proves to be a successful approach. The film’s most impactful scenes blend Roher’s personal emotional journey with his on-camera discussions with researchers.

“I’m expecting a baby,” Roher tells Tristan Harris—whose 2023 speech on the “AI Dilemma” first sparked the film’s creation. “Are we doomed?”

“This isn’t good news,” Harris responds, appearing clearly shaken, before the camera cuts away.

But AI and its societal effects are far too complex to be explored through just one person’s viewpoint. As such, the film features interviews with roughly 50 experts, with the clips paired alongside illustrative B-roll to form the film’s core visual framework.

This group includes doomsday predictors, who believe AI will wipe out humanity, and utopian thinkers, who argue AI will bring about a new age of human prosperity. (It’s somewhat jarring that the doomsday camp counts a godfather of AI, a co-creator of ChatGPT, and Google DeepMind’s chief AGI scientist among its ranks, while the optimistic side is represented by a Twitter-famous physicist and LinkedIn’s founder.) Even those who argue AI is overhyped make a cameo, though mostly as an afterthought—an oversight they, unsurprisingly, did not take well.

Producer Ted Tremper explained that the goal is to offer a wide range of viewpoints, letting viewers “chart their own path through the material.”

The AI Doc’s headline attractions are the CEOs leading the race to develop artificial general intelligence: OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis. The film has a chance to present these famous tech leaders in a fresh light, but getting powerful figures to speak honestly or share new, engaging insights is no easy feat. “Sam [Altman] is on the cusp of being one of the most powerful people on the planet,” Roher noted. “He’s not going to throw his footing off by saying something foolish to a random nobody.”

For a film about how individual choices will shape the future, the personalities of these leaders—two of whom infamously declined to hold hands during a recent press event—are hugely important. “I cracked a Terminator joke that [Sam Altman]… didn’t exactly find funny, shall we say,” Roher recalled. That scene never made it into the final cut. Instead, the CEOs spend most of their on-screen time repeating scripted, pre-planned talking points.

According to Tremper, the underwhelming quality of the CEOs’ on-screen appearances was intentional: a way to demonstrate that even the industry’s top leaders have no clear plan forward. “It’s critical that the film doesn’t pick sides when it comes to favoring one CEO over another, since all of them bear some level of responsibility, just to varying extents,” he explained.

The AI Doc tells the story of how cutthroat competition between wealthy, powerful corporations and rival nations is pushing humanity toward an uncertain future. “The path we’re currently on doesn’t look promising,” Tremper noted. In the months after filming wrapped, AI models were deployed in war zones to identify bombing targets, and the U.S. government punished a leading AI firm after it refused to lift restrictions barring its technology from being used for mass surveillance.

But the documentary also carries a message of hope, encouraging viewers to recognize the future’s unpredictability and take charge of their own role in shaping it. Since completing the film, Tremper has taken on the role of interim executive director of the Creators’ Coalition on AI, an organization dedicated to uniting the creative industry against the influence of big tech. Roher recently cancelled his ChatGPT subscription following OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon. And The AI Doc itself, which follows in the footsteps of films like The Social Dilemma and An Inconvenient Truth, is a three-year-long effort to steer the conversation in a new direction.

“I’m doing everything I can in my personal life—as a filmmaker, a father, and a husband—to nudge the trajectory of this technology just a little bit away from its preordained, negative outcome,” Roher shared.