A New AI Documentary Puts CEOs in the Hot Seat—but Goes Too Easy on Them | WIRED
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“The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” seeks the middle ground on a polarizing technology—and ends up letting tech execs like Sam Altman off the hook.
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this storyIt’s not easy to get an interview with Sam Altman—just ask Adam Bhala Lough, the filmmaker behind the recent documentary Deepfaking Sam Altman.Lough originally planned a feature exploring the potential and perils of AI that would center on a conversation with the OpenAI CEO. But, after having his inquiries ignored for months, he opted instead to commission a chatbot that mimicked Altman’s speech patterns and approximated his facial expressions by way of a digital avatar.The real Altman did sit down, however, for the new feature The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which hits theaters March 27. So did Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and Demis Hassabis, a cofounder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind Technologies. (Though the filmmakers say they requested interviews with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Elon Musk, neither made an appearance.)It’s an impressive level of access for codirector and documentary protagonist Daniel Roher, whose 2022 documentary Navalny, about the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, won an Academy Award. The problem is that once they’re on camera, Altman et al. say little we haven’t heard before—and they skate by on glib answers concerning their responsibilities to the rest of their species. When Roher asks Altman why anyone should trust him to guide the rapid acceleration of AI, given its extreme ramifications, Altman replies: “You shouldn’t.” The line of interrogation ends there.The AI D...
