Critic Reviews

It’s disturbing and engrossing. It doesn’t fully grapple with every moral, political, or philosophical consequence of the AI rush, and there are moments when it arguably lets some of its most powerful interview subjects off the hook too easily. But it still lands because it understands the essential terror at the center of this conversation: not simply that we are building intelligence at breakneck speed, but that wisdom—human, moral, civic—may be arriving nowhere near fast enough.

The AI Doc is visually pretty standard — lots of talking heads, B-roll of robots, and cutesy animation to make it more personal — but it’s also a grand primer on the topic, skipping the standard news headlines of Will It Take My Job? (maybe) and Does it Espouse Suicide (tragically, sometimes yes) in favour of a kind of point-counterpoint-synthesis setup.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a scary, dizzying and essential documentary. If you have any interest in artificial intelligence (which is to say: the future), you should go out and see it right now.

But aside from calling for some bland common sense regulations that should be uncontroversial to any sane person, Roher doesn’t attempt to make anyone agree with him. After all of the information is presented, the film is much more interested in exploring the human story of how each of us has to wrap our own mind around an impossibly large topic.

The film’s first-person approach and dynamic visual style make it more engaging and livelier than you might expect such a well-researched documentary about this serious subject to be.

The result is less clarifying than bewildering, though it’s often very interesting.

While the new doc was spurred by Roher’s own existential anxiety about what kind of AI-dominated world he would be bringing his unborn son into, the resulting film feels so determined to walk the middle road between doom times and boom times (hence its cheeky title) that its message cannot help but land as something almost algorithmically mushy.

“The AI Doc” is a well-intentioned but aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.

The pros don’t come from trustworthy sources and the cons require a lot more elaboration.

Roher’s willingness to blindly accept any and all of his speakers’ pronouncements leaves The AI Doc feeling toothless. ... Clearly, the filmmakers want to present the material in an evenhanded fashion so that viewers can make up their own mind, but in the name of so-called fairness, the documentary lacks any real perspective or inquisitiveness.