Are we barreling toward AI catastrophe? Is AI an existential threat, or an epochal opportunity? Those are the questions top of mind for a new documentary at Sundance, which features leading AI experts, critics and entrepreneurs, including Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, with views on the near-to-midterm future ranging from doom to utopia.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell and produced by Daniel Kwan (one half of The Daniels, the Oscar-winning duo behind Everything Everywhere All At Once), delves into the contentious topic of AI through Roher’s own anxiety. The Canadian film-maker, who won an Oscar in 2023 for the documentary Navalny, first became interested in the topic while experimenting with tools released by OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT. The sophistication of the public tools – the ability to produce whole paragraphs in seconds, or produce illustrations – both thrilled and unnerved him. AI was already radically shaping the filmmaking industry, and proclamations on the promise and peril of AI were everywhere, with little way for people outside the tech industry to evaluate them. As an artist, he wondered, how was he to make sense of it all?

Roher’s anxiety only increased when he and his wife, fellow film-maker Caroline Lindy, learned that they were expecting their first child. “It felt like the whole world was rushing into something without thinking,” he says in the film, as his excitement for parenthood collided with dread over the unknown variable of AI, which in just a few short years went from proprietary experiment to public good.

The AI Doc thus arises out of Roher’s most pressing question: is it safe to bring a child into this world? Alongside Kwan, Roher convened a series of experts to both explain the mechanics of the tech – and clarify some nebulous, alienating terms – and search for an answer. (It is both comforting and a little disturbing, for example, that no one seems to have a clear answer to the question “what is AI?”). In individual sit-down interviews, leading machine learning researchers including Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever and DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg all agree that there are aspects of AI models that humans cannot and will never be able to understand. Standard AI models are trained on “more data than anyone could ever read in several lifetimes”, as one machine learning expert puts it. And the pace of machine learning exceeds that of precedent – or film. “Any example you put in this movie will look absolutely clumsy by the time the movie comes out,” Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and a prominent voice in the apocalyptic 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, tells Roher.

Charlie Tyrell and Daniel Roher at Sundance Photograph: Arturo Holmes/Getty Images

The film first hears from a series of doomerists, or people concerned AI – and in particular Artificial General Intelligence…


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Last Update: January 28, 2026