The AI Doc: A Filmmaker’s Search for Answers in a World Shaped by Artificial Intelligence

A 90-minute documentary, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, was released in wide theaters on March 27.

The film was directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Daniel Rorer and Charlie Tyrell, a previous Academy Award nominee for a short film. The picture premiered earlier at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27 of this year.

The narrative is built around Rorer’s personal story: upon learning that he is about to become a father, he sets out to understand what kind of world his child will inherit. To find answers, he speaks with key industry figures and independent researchers.

His interviewees include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic founders Dario and Daniela Amodei, Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis, Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio, AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru, and Eliezer Yudkowsky — one of the most prominent advocates for stringent control over the development of AI systems.

The film highlights a polarized spectrum of opinions — from job displacement, mass surveillance, and the potential emergence of uncontrollable superintelligence, to arguments that AI could accelerate breakthroughs in medicine and help combat climate change.

The title introduces the neologism “apocaloptimist,” a term the filmmaker uses to describe a stance in which one acknowledges the severity of the threats while refusing to succumb to passive despair.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the documentary holds an 89% positive score based on 35 reviews. On Metacritic, the average score stands at 60 out of 100 based on 9 reviews, while the audience rating on IMDb is 7.3 out of 10.

The film is currently screening in offline theaters across the United States and is available on select online platforms (Fandango at Home and Apple TV). It has not yet been added to free streaming services.